[Marxism] A Cold Winter in Northern Wisconsin
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A Cold Winter in Northern Wisconsin An Editorial Commentary By Joe Johnson Fightback!: A Collection of Socialist Essays by Sylvia Weinstein It is winter and is cold here in northern Wisconsin; twenty degrees below freezing, bone cracking, killing cold. Lake Wissota, a large man made lake is frozen solid; a pick-up truck can be driven out on it. But I feel spring and a hot summer coming, and soon, I feel it in my old bones. The sun is coming up earlier every day, and every day its rays are hotter. Soon the ice will thin and crack, the heavy snow will melt and there will come destructive and unstoppable floods. The people native to this region are preparing, as they do every year for the floods of spring. There is much to be done, now before they come, for the floods, to some extent, can be controlled and directed so that they will help the land and the people who live on it. I can remember the early spring of 1934 in Minneapolis. One of the big songs was “Brother can you spare a dime?” another was “I don’t want your millions mister, all I want is my old job back.” Demoralization, cynicism, depression was the mood of the nation. There were some protests, a few small strikes, but the strikes were quickly defeated. But Marxists’ red mole was working underground and the ice cracked, the snow melted and the floods came. Now the earth has turned and spring comes once again. Spring on a scale never seen before, worldwide in scope. The question is what ditches in the good earth shall we dig to control and direct the floods so that they will help this land and the people who live on it. We do not start nor can we stop the flood of revolt, but what we can do is direct it. Directed correctly, it can stop the earth from becoming unbearably hot and give time to rebuild a far better society than what we have now, but we need to dig our ditches now and correctly. We look closely and see the natural lay of the land. Where are the very low areas and how are they likely to channel the movement of the floods? And on a bright sunny day in late winter we can see a small trickle of water moving down one of the natural channels. The occupy movement was one such trickle. It lasted a short while and showed us the lay of the land; gave us very important information before it was frozen with the force and violence of the capitalist state. Now there is a little stream of water starting to move. It’s the $15 dollar-an-hour minimum wage for all, now. It unites the very small trickles of water into a small stream. It unites and gives direction. But, as all small streams must, it follows the contours of the land and can be blocked by very small rocks. Our job is to smooth its path, to help it move past and through the rocks to give it space and time to grow. The 1934 strikes won major victories against the big bosses. The strikers built a fighting union movement in the C.I.O.; but they had to stop short of a victory and the bosses were able to regroup and build giant dams to hold back the flood of revolution. Then came WWII that saved the American ruling class. The American ruling class went on to use the workers to become the strongest imperialist nation that the world has ever seen. Then the deep-freeze of the American Century. Its expansion into “the far East” was stopped with the Korean War. Now new revolutionary floods are coming that are world wide in nature. The American working people have found a banner that they can unite around. It is “$15 dollar minimum wage.” This gives people a living wage, and given the high level of labor productivity it can be given to all. This is what they voted for in Seattle, what they will fight the bosses for all across the nation. This is the slogan of “Bread” for the U.S. today, as “Bread” was the slogan for the Russian revolution of 1917. All who struggle to save the earth from destruction, all who want a new world in birth today will unite around the new banner. How is this to be done? The workers in unorganized low paying jobs are cutting edge; truly these people have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win. They now have the support of the majority of the people. They need now to break their chains and move their banner forward into the ranks of the capitalists and their supporters. The capitalists could pass a law giving a $15 dollar per hour minimum wage. They can do it, but they will not; to do so would show weakness. Also, they are arrogant and feel all-powerful; having defeated the unions time after time, they are sure they can defeat this new union-like development of the lowest of their wage slaves. Given their many victories, they do not rethink the situation, but rather simply repeat the actio
[Marxism] North American Machinists Union Slate Challenges Top Leaders
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == North American Machinists Union Slate Challenges Top Leaders By REUTERS JAN. 25, 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/01/25/business/25reuters-machinist-election.html?src=busln SEATTLE — North American members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace workers on Saturday nominated challengers seeking to replace top union leaders, a move that could lead to a tougher negotiating stance toward major companies. At stake is control of about 339,000 dues-paying members at companies ranging from aerospace and defense giants Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp to United Airlines, heavy equipment maker Caterpillar Inc, a factory owned by furnishing retailer Ikea AB, and even Maine lobstermen. On Saturday, members at several of roughly 800 local lodges nominated candidates to challenge current IAM President R. Thomas Buffenbarger, General Secretary-Treasurer Robert Roach and eight general vice-presidents, members and union officials said. Results of the nomination are expected next week after the lodges submit results to national leaders. The nominations could spark a runoff Feb 8 to decide which nominees the lodges will endorse. If the challengers win support from at least 25 local lodges, an election would be held in April, the first contested IAM ballot in more than 50 years. If fewer than 25 lodges support the challengers, the incumbent leaders would automatically be elected. Jay Cronk, a Metro-North Railway mechanic in New Haven, Connecticut, who is challenging Buffenbarger for IAM president, said he's opposed to what he and other members see as high spending by the current leaders. With membership declining, top leaders' salaries should not keep rising and they should not have a private jet for travel, "We have developed a culture of privilege at the top," said Cronk, who also served as staff member of the national union organization for 14 years. According to Department of Labor records, Buffenbarger was paid $304,000 in total compensation in 2012, the latest figure available, up from $293,000 in 2011. Roach's total compensation was $271,000 in 2012 and $258,000 in 2011. Membership has declined to 577,000 active and retired members in 2012 from about 731,000 in 2000, according to the Department of Labor. The incumbent leaders say the challengers lack experience and skills to run a union with a $1 billion strike fund, a $9 billion health and pension fund and annual spending of more than $160 million. It was unclear whether the challengers could obtain the 25 lodge endorsements needed to trigger an election, said Richard Sloan, a spokesman for the IAM's current leaders. "We have not had a contested election since 1961," Sloan said. "That means no candidate except the incumbents have ever exceeded the requirement of 25 locals nominating. Much of the reason for that is the candidates that run are fools and flakes and fops and didn't come up to the level of seriousness required of candidates." Of the Learjet, Sloan noted IAM members make plane at Bombardier Inc and it costs less than commercial flights for the 250 days a year Buffenbarger travels. While the issues in the contest initially revolved around spending and management of the union, a leadership change also could affect the direction the union will take on pensions and other key contract elements. The IAM recently made headlines when it negotiated an eight-year extension to the IAM labor contract with Boeing that would ensure the company's newest jetliner, the 777X, would be built in Washington state, where IAM has about 31,000 members. In exchange, workers agreed to replace their pension with a defined-contribution retirement plan. They also accepted lower raises and higher health care costs. The contract was widely rejected by Seattle-area members in November. In January, international leaders held a second vote on a revised contract, despite objections from local union leaders in the Seattle area, who said the new offer was too similar to the first one that had been rejected. The contract was approved by 51 percent of members who voted. The decision roiled the membership, exposing deep divides on pensions versus job security, and has prompted members to file unfair labor practice charges against the union and Boeing. Jason Redrup, an elected business representative of the local 751 in Seattle, who is running for one of the eight general vice president positions, said he would have tried to persuade members not to vote away their pensions. "As a leader I would not advocate that members give up so much," he said. "If they decided to do it, that's their right." The IAM nominations are being rerun after a complaint filed last year prompted the U.S. D
[Marxism] Profiting Off the Sick, Injured and the Healthy
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Profiting Off the Sick, Injured and the Healthy By Bonnie Weinstein Socialist Viewpoint Vol. 14, No. 1 http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/janfeb_14/janfeb_14_06.html According to a December 11, 2013 article in the New York Times by Gretchen Reynolds titled, “Exercise as Potent Medicine,”1 “Exercise can be as effective as many frequently prescribed drugs in treating some of the leading causes of death, according to a new report. The study raises important questions about whether our healthcare system focuses too much on medications and too little on activity to combat physical ailments.” One of the challenges of the study, the article points out, was that while “They ended up with data covering 305 past experiments that, collectively, involved almost 340,000 participants, which is an impressive total. …Most of the volunteers had received drugs. Only 57 of the experiments, involving 14,716 volunteers, had examined the impact of exercise as a treatment.” The pharmaceutical industry does not pay for experiments measuring the effectiveness of exercise and diet on health. In fact, according to Dr. Ioannidis, one of the doctors who worked on the report, “‘Only five percent’ of the available and relevant experiments in his [Dr. Ioannidis’s] new analysis involved exercise. ‘We need far more information’ about how exercise compares, head to head, with drugs in the treatment of many conditions, he said, as well as what types and amounts of exercise confer the most benefit and whether there are side effects, such as injuries. Ideally, he said, pharmaceutical companies would set aside a tiny fraction of their profits for such studies. But he is not optimistic that such funding will materialize, without widespread public pressure.” Basically, exercise is not profitable and could, in fact, cut into the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. But it gets worse. Connecting the dots According to a December 14, 2013 article in the Times by Alan Schwarz titled, “The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder,”2 with the sub-head: “The Number of Diagnoses Soared Amid a 20-Year Drug Marketing Campaign,” “After more than 50 years leading the fight to legitimize attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Keith Conners could be celebrating. “Severely hyperactive and impulsive children, once shunned as bad seeds, are now recognized as having a real neurological problem. Doctors and parents have largely accepted drugs like Adderall and Concerta to temper the traits of classic A.D.H.D., helping youngsters succeed in school and beyond. “But Dr. Conners did not feel triumphant this fall as he addressed a group of fellow A.D.H.D. specialists in Washington. “He noted that recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the diagnosis had been made in 15 percent of high school-age children, and that the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them ‘a national disaster of dangerous proportions.’ “The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,’ Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. ‘This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.’” The article goes on to point out, “The rise of A.D.H.D. diagnoses and prescriptions for stimulants over the years coincided with a remarkably successful two-decade campaign by pharmaceutical companies to publicize the syndrome and promote the pills to doctors, educators and parents. With the children’s market booming, the industry is now employing similar marketing techniques as it focuses on adult A.D.H.D., which could become even more profitable.” These drugs have become so pervasive that the TV cartoon-show, The Simpsons, featured a segment in one of the shows where ten-year-old Bart Simpson, who is prescribed Ritalin for his failings in school, sings this little ditty to the tune of “Popeye the Sailor Man,” “When I can’t stop my fiddlin’ I just takes me Ritalin I’m poppin’ and sailin’, man!” Of course, there’s nothing wrong with Bart except that he hates school and homework. The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t examine the deteriorating quality of our public education system; the over crowded classes filled with children at or below the poverty line. They don’t study the effects on health of the school to jail pipeline; the deteriorating neighborhoods; joblessness; poor diet and sedentary lifestyles not to mention the lack of safe and healthy outdoor spaces and activities for children and adults. Instead they devise a pill that
[Marxism] Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand. BY SHANE HARRIS AND MATTHEW M. AID AUGUST 26, 2013 http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America's military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned. In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent. The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn't disclose. U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein's government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture. "The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn't have to. We already knew," he told Foreign Policy. According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment for this story. In contrast to today's wrenching debate over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein's widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted. In the documents, the CIA said that Iran might not discover persuasive evidence of the weapons' use -- even though the agency possessed it. Also, the agency noted that the Soviet Union had previously used chemical agents in Afghanistan and suffered few repercussions. It has been previously reported that the United States provided tactical intelligence to Iraq at the same time that officials suspected Hussein would use chemical weapons. But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United States' knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched. Top CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, a close friend of President Ronald Reagan, were told about the location of Iraqi chemical weapons assembly plants; that Iraq was desperately trying to make enough mustard agent to keep up with frontline demand from its forces; that Iraq was about to buy equipment from Italy to help speed up production of chemical-packed artillery rounds and bombs;
[Marxism] Cuba's Non-Farm Co-ops Debut This Week Amid Move Toward Markets
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Cuba's Non-Farm Co-ops Debut This Week Amid Move Toward Markets By REUTERS June 30, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2013/06/30/business/30reuters-cuba-reform-cooperatives.html?src=busln HAVANA — One hundred state-run produce markets and 26 other establishments were scheduled to become private cooperatives on Monday as Communist-run Cuba continues to shed secondary economic activity in favor of individual initiative and markets. The cooperatives will be the first outside of agriculture since all businesses were nationalized in 1968. The government says many more establishments will follow, beginning in 2014, as an alternative to small and medium-sized state businesses in retail and food services, transportation, light manufacturing and construction, among other sectors. The produce markets were supplied exclusively by the state, which also set prices and wages. As cooperatives they will now purchase produce from any source and set their own prices, with the exception of a few state supplied staples, for example rice, chick peas and potatoes in Havana. At one of the dozens of Havana markets set to become cooperatives this week, the mood was festive on Saturday as workers painted the dark and dingy premises, fixed broken bins and in general spruced up the place on their last day as state employees. "We were given the choice of working as a cooperative member or being laid off," Antonio Rivera, a worker turned member, said. "I think we will be better off so I joined," he said. On Sunday the 100 markets took inventory and made other preparations, before their adventure into the country's growing "non-state" sector began. President Raul Castro, who took over from his brother Fidel in 2008, has already taken steps to deregulate small private businesses in the retail sector, lease small state shops and taxis to individual employees and fallow state lands to would-be small farmers in search of improved production and efficiency. According to the government, more than 430,000 people now work in the non-state sector which consists of private entrepreneurs, their employees and individuals who own or lease taxis and the like. The figure does not include some 2,000 agricultural cooperatives and 400,000 small farmers. MARKET ECONOMICS HAILED The new cooperative markets average 15 or fewer members and will lease their premises from the state. They will function independently of state entities and businesses, set prices in cases where they are not fixed by the state, operate on a democratic basis, divide profit as they see fit and receive better tax treatment than individually owned businesses, according to a decree law published in December. The law allows for an unlimited number of members and use of contracted employees on a three-month basis. The newly elected administrator of one market said that for weeks they had been making contact with farm cooperatives in preparation for Monday, and could also buy from individual farmers and state farms and wholesale markets. "I'm sure the public will benefit. The produce will be of better quality, there will be better service and people will go where the prices are the lowest," he said, asking his name not be used because he feared he would get into trouble for talking to a foreign journalist. "There will be more competition and the winners will be those who do the best job," he said, adding, "everything will depend on us and we will have to look for merchandise wherever because if we don't we will not make anything." Consumers appeared to support the measure, though some fretted over a possible increase in prices. "They should have done this long ago," Soledad Martinez said as she shopped at the market on Saturday. "Now there will be a greater variety and we will be treated better. I just hope prices decrease a bit and do not go up," she said. Cuban authorities began discussing three years ago how to transform bankrupt small and medium-sized state businesses - plagued by pilfering, embezzlement and general inefficiency - into cooperatives. The Communist Party adopted a sweeping five-year plan to "update" the economy in 2011, which included moving more than 20 percent of the state labor force of 5 million people into a new "non-state" sector of private and cooperative businesses.` (Editing by Eric Walsh) Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The Last Dime on Earth
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The Last Dime on Earth By Bonnie Weinstein March/April 2013 Socialist Viewpoint Magazine http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/ The commanders of capital, by the very nature of the system of capitalism that they command, will fight to the death the last person on Earth for the last dime on Earth. There can be no end to war, exploitation and murder as long as capitalism continues to enslave the mass of humanity and place private profit above all else. In fact, capitalism is holding back the progress of humanity by force of violence and the threat—and it is a real and deadly serious threat—of worldwide annihilation. Workers work, capitalist’s steal Meanwhile, in the real world of those who create, invent, explore, research, dig, weld, chop, farm, teach, cook, clean, saw, hammer, sand and paint—for all of us that do the work—we’re advancing by leaps and bounds. We’ve thought of, designed and manufactured robots that can do our work for us. We’ve made instant communication across the globe an everyday reality. We can exchange any information and have any books or films—anything electronically available—at our fingertips in a matter of seconds. Just imagine if we used instant communication to democratically figure out how much stuff we really needed to produce to satisfy everyone. Then manufactured products of the highest quality, carefully and without waste of either materials or labor or polluting the environment. And then distributed them free to whoever wanted them according to a careful, mindful and democratically conceived, worldwide plan? We have the tools, materials, wherewithal and human power to do all these things. Only the capitalist dictatorship stands in our way. Capitalism is a roadblock to human progress Private capitalist-control over the means of production and the accumulation of massive amounts of private wealth is only possible because the capitalists rule by force, by military might. The U.S. military—the most powerful military ever—is currently the biggest roadblock to human progress and to the ultimate goal of a peaceful and just world. The U.S. military is everywhere, implementing the will of the most powerful capitalist class in the world. The fulfillment of people’s needs could be accomplished. The material conditions necessary to do so are available. It just can’t happen under capitalism. There are many of examples, but here are just three that illustrate how the capitalist profit motive—because it must come before human needs—stands in the way of human progress. Fighting disease In a February 5, 2013 New York Times article by Roger Bate titled, “Feeding a Disease With Fake Drugs,” “In the largest study of its kind, to be published today in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, colleagues and I have found that fake and poorly made antibiotics are being widely used to treat tuberculosis. These substandard drugs are almost certainly making the disease more resistant to drugs, posing a grave health threat to communities around the world. “Our research team collected samples of two commonly used medicines, isoniazid and rifampicin, from neighborhood pharmacies and markets in 17 countries where tuberculosis is pervasive across Africa, Asia, South America and Europe. Nearly one of every ten pills we collected failed to meet basic quality standards. In African countries, one in six pills were substandard. “Failing pills typically had too little of the active ingredient—the molecule that destroys tuberculosis bacteria. Most of these drugs came from legitimate manufacturers; they were either poorly made or corroded in transit. The rest appeared genuine, but after researchers tested them and more closely analyzed the packaging, they turned out to be fakes—produced and distributed through criminal enterprises. A pack of fake pills might sell for a dollar on the streets of India, but estimates of the global market for fake drugs range into the tens-of-billions of dollars. …As long as substandard tuberculosis drugs are permitted in the marketplace, people will continue to die in pursuit of a cure. And without a coordinated response, growing resistance will eventually render even the highest quality drugs obsolete.” The tragedy is that fierce competition for profit and the desperation of the poverty-stricken ill trumps pharmaceutical safety. What this shows is that when the curing of disease is a for-profit business (and certainly the drug industry is one of the most profitable of them all), the quest for more profits will trump the cure—and, in fact as in this case—compound the disease and human suffering. The environment According to a very short New York Times article by the Associated Press
[Marxism] Oregon Prisoners Driven to Suicide
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Oregon Prisoners Driven to Suicide Torture in Solitary Confinement Units By Kevin “Rashid” Johnson VIA Email Introduction I am not one prone to fits of temper. But a few days ago I almost lost it. My outrage was prompted by witnessing the steady deterioration of another prisoner, resulting from particularly acute mental torture inflicted in Oregon’s Disciplinary Segregation Units (DSU), which duplicate almost exactly conditions of torture practiced at Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary, that were outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1800s.[1] The prisoner, who’d been housed in a suicide precaution cell next to me in the DSU of Oregon’s Snake River Correctional Institution (SRCI), went into an immediate depressed state upon being put into the DSU. Initially, he talked a little. Then abruptly withdrew. He stopped eating, to which the guards were unanimously indifferent. Several taunted him, “if you don’t eat it I will.” He then stuffed toilet paper and the cell’s mattress into the cracks around the edges of the door, apparently to seal off all outside sound and “barricade” himself in. He blacked out the camera in the cell, and began talking to himself. He sat catatonic in the corner of the cell and naked for days on end. He was confronted only twice by mental health staff who indifferently left his cell when he wasn’t responsive to their half-hearted attempts to talk. Only after I verbally protested the blatant apathy of mental health and medical staff to his condition, which was obviously due to their collaborating in his mental torture, was a nurse brought to the cell to physically examine him. Whereupon his blood pressure was found extremely low and both the nurse and accompanying guard expressed his mouth and skin showed obvious symptoms of severe dehydration—in addition to not eating, he’d also apparently not been drinking water for several days, although he was supposedly in a “monitored” cell. The nurse had him immediately taken out of the unit, likely to the medical department since he didn’t return. The next day I was moved to another unit as well. That was on November 14th. A high tide of suicide I never learned his full name. The guards and other officials called him only “Acosta” (presumably his last name). In the DSU where we were confined together, there are six suicide precaution cells. I was housed next to one of them. These precaution cells have in-cell video cameras and prisoners confined to them are generally given only a blue nylon smock-like garment to wear, a nylon blanket, and a mattress. Throughout my DSU assignment at SRCI these cells were always occupied and a constantly changing rotation of prisoners were kept on watch as a result of suicide attempts and ideations. In 22 years of imprisonment, I have never seen such a consistently high and continuous series of suicide cases, which I immediately recognized to result from the extreme sensory deprivation of DSU housing. Compelling idle minds Prior to my Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) assignment in February 2012, I’d spent 17 years in solitary confinement, enduring various extremes of sensory deprivation. During that time I witnessed numerous prisoners deteriorate mentally under the conditions of solitary. But in most cases, it took months to years because there was a limited amount of access to in-cell property and one could use the telephone periodically. However, in Oregon’s DSU no personal property is allowed, beyond a pen, writing paper, and, if one can afford it and has anyone to regularly correspond with, a few mailing envelopes. One cannot use the telephone to communicate with loved ones at all. One can’t have personal books even. Not even law books. In DSU a prisoner may only receive up to three novels from a small rolling book cart kept in the unit. Many of which are missing bindings and pages. Such reading per se does little to stimulate the mind and denies one the opportunity and right to select his own subjects and fields of research and study.[2] The three novels may only be exchanged from the cart once per week. DSU prisoners are heard frequently complaining that having nothing else to do, they complete novels in two to three days, and are otherwise left completely idle and “bored out of their minds.” Meantime the deterioration sets in: the constant cell-pacing or catatonic states, incessantly talking to oneself, depression, irrational searches for stimulation, and of course, self mutilation and suicide attempts. Torture by design And ODOC officials know what they’re doing. They consciously use acute sensory deprivation (psychological torture) as a behavior modification technique, with the assistance of mental health s
Re: [Marxism] The Pathology of the Processed Food Industry » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == My comments on: The Obese Hunger of Famished Psyches The Pathology of the Processed Food Industry by MANUEL GARCIA, JR. http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/02/22/the-pathology-of-the-processed-food-industry/ This is an interesting article most of the way through. The problem comes with the author's conclusion: "Most of our healthcare costs, like the “war on cancer” (which is also a socialized externality of the tobacco industry), the epidemics of coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes, are simply the result of the population swallowing the pernicious externalities required to produce the profitability of the processed food industry. The “market solution” to our financial crisis of healthcare would be to tax all processed foods sufficiently to fund full universal nationalized healthcare. (Processed food could be defined leniently as any individually marketed item with more than 5 ingredients, or rigorously as any food that is not certified organic). "Such a scheme would undoubtedly cause the food industry to revamp its product lines so we the people could eat real foods bought conveniently at our local supermarkets, and not get sick: obese, diabetic, hypertensive, arteriosclerotic, cancerous, and prematurely dead. This would consequently lower the costs of our healthcare. When the healthiest foods are both widely available in all their varieties, and are also the lowest priced foods, while the processed stealthily toxic stuff is the most expensive ($50 McDonald’s “Happy Meals,” $15 Coca Colas) then many (most?) Americans will regain their health." First, it taxes the very people who are the victims of for-profit capitalist food production! Second, the "diet industry" itself is criminal. All sorts of "quick fixes" are pushed onto the most vulnerable---liposuction, Lap Band surgery, Gastric bypass surgery, and a myriad of "diet aids" and supplements that only work temporarily or don't work at all; and that are a multi-billion-dollar industry. The diet industry is designed to give the false impression that the hard work of exercise and proper diet can be bypassed for these quick fixes. The truth is there is no shortcut to a healthy body. It takes hard work, i.e.. exercise, which, actually, turns out to be fun; and a healthy diet which, turns out to be pretty tasty and easy when you know how to do it correctly. In other words, it takes education, training and time to get and benefit from a healthy life-style. And, most of all, under capitalism, all this takes money! Why not raise taxes on the corporations that produce this junk in the first place to pay for universal healthcare that teaches a healthy lifestyle; that includes free physical training and access to a healthy diet? Tax McDonald's, Cocoa Cola, drug, alcohol and cigarette companies and the for-profit medical "profession" with their "weight loss surgery," etc.; not the poverty-stricken workers forced to eat the junk, or who go into debt to get their stomachs cut, banded and stapled, etc., and who have been made to become addicted to prescription drugs, alcohol and smoking! Put the blame where it belongs! Tax the corporate criminals, not the victims of their "get rich at any cost" scheme of junk foods, alcohol, cigarettes and drugs for the masses! Comradely, Bonnie Weinstein > > Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu > Set your options at: > http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/giobon%40comcast.net Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Lynne Stewart Emergency Alert!
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Please forward widely Lynne Stewart Emergency Alert! Dear Friends, Below you will find today's critical communication from longtime Lynne Stewart supporter, Betty Davis. The information concerns Lynne's health and her legal status. As you will read below Lynne's breast cancer has returned. Lynne was successfully treated, we had hoped, two years ago and given a clean bill of health, as much as such diagnoses can be counted on. But a single spot was found on one lung a few months ago. Now another has appeared on the other lung and others in her upper back, all associated with her original breast cancer. Her husband Ralph Poynter told me today that Lynne's condition was still very treatable and that a cure was not at all to be ruled out and especially so if prison officials allowed her the expert treatment afforded her previously in a prominent New York City hospital. Lynne's request to be moved to that facility was denied. She is to be treated in a prison related facility, but fortunately under the direction of and using the protocols of her doctor/daughter, who is expected to be with Lynne at any moment. We are still hopeful for a positive outcome, even under the most difficult conditions. Meanwhile, Lynne's appeal preparations for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court are now in progress, with Lynne having assembled a first rate team of attorneys including members of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild. Lynne campaigned for Mumia's freedom for the several years that she was free on bail and traveling the country in her own defense. She was present at Mumia's court hearing in Philadelphia and appeared on Democracy Now!, with Mumia phoning in in her defense. I urge you to carefully read the material below and lend a hand. The stakes are high. We will continue to demand the finest medical treatment for Lynne and, of course, continue to campaign for her freedom and immediate release. Lynne, a prominent civil rights attorney of 30 years, was the victim of a government-orchestrated 2005 frame-up trial that was riddled with violations of fundamental legal principles. She was convicted on five counts of conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism. This was based on the government's charge that her public issuance a press release on behalf of her client, the "blind sheik" Omar Abdel Rachman, an Egyptian cleric who was similarly framed up and imprisoned for life on "terrorism" charges, was illegal. Ironically, Rachman's freedom is today being demanded by Egypt's new President Mohamed Morsi. Lynne, 72, was originally convicted and sentenced to 28 months in prison, but this "light" sentence was contested by the reactionary U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and her sentence was outrageously increased to 10 years, by the compliant Federal District Court trial judge, John Koeltl. I urge you to write to Lynne and convey your love and solidarity. She toured the Bay Area several times in previous years, always speaking to admiring and stunned audiences, who realized that Lynne's case was central to everyone's civil liberties. Lynne's conviction was a message to all attorneys that defense of the unpopular, defense of democratic rights and especially defense of Muslim victims of government persecution, was dangerous. Lynne's conviction and extended sentence served to massively chill the defense bar. Lynne's freedom and life itself in large part depends on our solidarity. Write Lynne at: Lynne Stewart 53504-054 Federal Medical Center Carswell P.O. Box 27137 Fort Worth, Texas 76127 Send your generous contribution payable to: Lynne Stewart Organization 1070 Dean Street Brooklyn, New York 11216 In solidarity, Jeff Mackler, West Coast Coordinator Lynne Stewart Defense Committee 510-268-9429 jmack...@lmi.net URGENT MESSAGE OF APPEAL FOR LYNNE STEWART- THE PEOPLE'S ATTORNEY Greetings It is urgent that you listen to the audio email below. It is the latest update from Ralph Poynter, Mya Shone & Ralph Schonmann about LYNNE STEWARTS fate in prison. Lynne Stewart's breast cancer is spreading to her lungs and shoulders. She needs immediate treatment NOW. The prison authorities have known this since September. WE ARE ALSO IN THE PROCESS OF LAUNCHING HER APPEAL TO THE SUPREME COURT. DEADLINE FEBRUARY 21, 2013. All we are asking you to: Listen to the audio below and update yourself on the facts. Check out the website as well. Write a letter of support to Lynne Stewart- 53504 - 054, FEDERAL MEDICAL CNTR, CARSWELL, P.O. BOX 27137, FT. WORTH, TEXAS 76127. You don't have to write the prison authorities because THEY READ EVERYTHING WE SEND AND TELL HER SO. Send this email out to all your listservs, especially to LAWYERS becaus
[Marxism] Scene of South African Mine Shooting May Have Been Altered, Inquiry Is Told
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Scene of South African Mine Shooting May Have Been Altered, Inquiry Is Told "JOHANNESBURG — Photo and video evidence presented to a commission investigating the police shooting that left 34 striking miners dead strongly suggests that weapons were placed next to the bodies of dead miners, in an attempt to make it appear that the police had no choice but to fire on them, according to lawyers representing the families of the victims." By LYDIA POLGREEN November 6, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/07/world/africa/scene-of-south-african-marikana-mine-shooting-may-have-been-altered-inquiry-is-told.html?ref=world JOHANNESBURG — Photo and video evidence presented to a commission investigating the police shooting that left 34 striking miners dead strongly suggests that weapons were placed next to the bodies of dead miners, in an attempt to make it appear that the police had no choice but to fire on them, according to lawyers representing the families of the victims. A commission of inquiry has been hearing testimony from police officials, mining companies, union leaders and witnesses to try to determine what happened on Aug. 16, when the police opened fire on platinum miners engaged in a wildcat strike for higher wages in Marikana, 80 miles northwest of Johannesburg. The killings, so reminiscent of apartheid-era shootings of protesters, set off widespread outrage and copycat strikes at other mines among workers angry at the persistent poverty and inequality that have come to characterize post-apartheid South Africa. There is little doubt that at least some of the miners at Marikana had been violent. Ten people, including two security guards and two police officers, had already been killed by the miners during the course of the strike before the police shooting took place. Then, in a detailed multimedia briefing the day after the shooting, police officials argued that the miners, many of them brandishing traditional weapons like clubs, spears and machetes, had refused to turn back when fired upon with rubber bullets and other nonlethal weapons. “The militant group stormed toward the police firing shots and wielding dangerous weapons,” the police commissioner, Riah Phiyega, said at the time, arguing that officers were left with no option but to open fire with live ammunition. But investigations by local journalists — and now testimony and documentary evidence at the commission, lawyers contend — have suggested a far more sinister portrait of the events that unfolded that afternoon. On Monday, gruesome images of the dead were shown as relatives looked on, sometimes in tears. One photograph showed the crumpled, bloody body of a miner next to a hunk of rock. In a police video taken during the day, nothing lies next to his outstretched right hand. But in a photograph taken in the dark, which lawyers say is from was taken later the same day, a machete with a yellow handle lies next to the man’s hand. “The evidence clearly showed there is at least a strong prima facie case that there has been an attempt to defeat the ends of justice,” George Bizos, the anti-apartheid lawyer who defended Nelson Mandela against treason charges that sent him to Robben Island for 27 years, told the inquiry, the Sapa news agency reported. In one of the videos, police officers can be heard joking and laughing next to the bodies of the slain miners. Two dead miners were photographed in handcuffs. Another body was found to have 12 bullet injuries. The testimony also revealed the horrific violence that preceded the police shooting. A police official presented photographs two security guards who had been hacked to death by a mob of striking workers seeking to march on the headquarters of a rival union. One’s face was hacked, and his tongue cut out. The other’s body was burned so badly as to be unrecognizable. The commission, which is led by a retired justice of South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal, has been hearing evidence since Oct. 1 and is expected to finish its work within four months of its creation. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Letter from Lynne Stewart
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Letter from Lynne Stewart >From inside FMC Carswell Prison, Ft. Worth, Texas Once again the 2d Circuit has turned me down–this time the whole Court, en banc. Not surprising, I was well aware that we were dealing with the Company Store and could expect very little. Nonetheless as a favorite line from Edna St Vincent Millay: “Pity me that the heart is slow to learn What the Quick mind beholds at every turn” I never lose hope that my case will be resolved as being too obvious a contradiction to justice for them to sustain! Our next stop is the petition for Certiorari to the Supreme Court, asking them to hear us. We will be trying to impress them with the significant wrongfulness of the whole prosecution itself and of the errors at trial and later at sentencing. Our due date is some time in late December and we are hoping to have Amicus support, so if you are part of a group that supports lawyers or civil rights etc. please suggest it as early as possible. Contact Jill Shellow, my lawyer by email, for further explanations. Looking forward to my 73 birthday on October 8, the one bright ray of light is that my husband, Ralph Poynter, will be speaking at the National Lawyers Guild convention held in Pasadena, California from the 10th to 14th of October. Addressing the Plenary he will speak of my case and that of other political prisoners locked away for decades by a vindictive government. I wish I could attend and meet and greet and hug and laugh with my lawyer buddies of many years and many conventions but I will have to be content with my usual micro-management style from afar—Texas, that is! Meanwhile, I continue to tough it out. I am feeling quite well after the surgery, an infection and then a severe iron deficiency—my usual vim and vigor are back and ready for the fight with the Supreme Court who thinks corporations are people—what will they make of me, a real person? (smile) Join me. Bring me Home, where I can join in some of the epic battles now at hand. Posted in BEHIND BARS, From Lynne, September 27, 2012 ‘Court Denies Lynne Stewart Re-hearing’ By Jeff Mackler Dear Friends of Lynne Stewart, On Monday, September 24, 2012 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected Lynne’s appeal for a re-hearing before the entire court. Her original conviction was upheld in 2009 by a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit. The Second Circuit’s opinion was not unexpected. This was the same court that earlier pressed Federal District Court John Koeltl to re-consider his original 28-month sentence and instead sentence Lynne to ten years. Lynne, a leading civil rights attorney for 30 years, was convicted in 2005 on frame-up charges of conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism. Her crime? She issued a press release on behalf of her client, the “blind sheik” Omar Abdel Rachman, a leading Egyptian Islamic cleric, was also a victim of the U.S. “war on terror” when a government-instigated frame-up trial convicted him of conspiracy to destroy New York buildings. Typical of “conspiracy” convictions, no evidence of wrongdoing was presented at his trial. Rachman, a leading critic of the Hosni Mubarack dictatorship in Egypt, and now serving a life sentence in Rochester, Minnesota, was the subject of national attention a few months ago when Egypt’s new president, Mohammad Morsi, embarrassed the Obama administration by demanding his release. Lynne’s attorneys explained on Monday that “The clock now starts running on our Petition for Certiorari to the Supreme Court. We have 90 days to get it filed (with the possibility of a 30-day extension).” Lynne is presently imprisoned at FMC Carswell outside of Fort Worth, Texas. She has successfully recovered from a difficult surgery that was spitefully delayed by prison authorities. For the past 45 days Lynne was denied all visitors, and other basic prison rights on the trumped-up accusation that she violated prison rules in assisting a fellow prisoner certify a legal document. Her spirits are high and she is now going through a backlog of some 100-plus letters from friends and supporters. Here’s a brief summary/timeline of Lynne’s case. · Indicted on April 9, 2002; · On February 10, 2005, convicted on all counts of conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism; · On October 17, 2006, sentenced to 28 months; · On November 17, 2009, a US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit three-judge panel upheld the conviction, shamelessly accusing Lynne of “knowingly and willfully making false statements,” re-directing her case to District Court Judge John Koeltl for re-sentencing, instructing him to consider enhancements for terrorism, perjury, and abuse of her position as a lawyer; · An outrageous
[Marxism] On the Waterfront, Rise of the Machines
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On the Waterfront, Rise of the Machines "In the 1960s, when New York was the world’s busiest port, there were more than 35,000 longshoremen on the city’s docks. Today, there are 3,500." By ALAN FEUER September 28, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/nyregion/in-new-yorks-port-the-rise-of-the-machines.html?ref=nyregion NEWARK — IN the rising light of a mid-September morning, the CSAV Pyrenees, a blue-water freighter sailing out of Suape Port in Brazil, was lashed to its lines at Berth 59 of the Port Newark Container Terminal. At rest beneath a looming row of gantry cranes, the ship had come to port on a half-day call to discharge a load of South American cargo: 421 containers’ worth, each one weighing as much as a family of elephants — or slightly more than 40,000 pounds. Fifty feet above the deck, crane trolleys flew through the air, their jawlike spreaders plucking boxes from the giant vessel’s hold. As the boxes were lowered onto the wharf, they were gobbled up by a waiting fleet of straddle carriers, busy arachnid vehicles that alerted a computer to the cargo’s arrival, and hauled it off to preordained locations in the yard. >From the asphalt dock, the scene looked a little like the launching pad at >Cape Canaveral: a sprawling techno-space dominated by Jurassic-size, seemingly >autonomous machines. One astonishing thing about the longshore business these >days is how its vast scope — tons of roses from Costa Rica, sneakers from >South Korea and children’s clothes from Malaysia are moved each year — >requires so few visible human bodies. Much of the work takes place indoors. Up in a control room, sitting among some peers, a superintendent monitored a digital schematic of the ship, tracking the operation, step by step, in real time. His blinking, changing screen showed the number of containers already unloaded and the number still aboard. It showed how many crane lifts and straddle-carrier moves had been accomplished and, moreover, whether the ratio of moves-per-15-minute-increment was faster, or slower, than the terminal had planned. Sitting in an office nearby was James Pelliccio, the president of the terminal, one of six such outfits that make up the Port of New York and New Jersey and lie in a loose semicircle south of Manhattan from Newark Bay through the Kill Van Kull to Upper New York Bay. “The way I see it, we’re not really in the transportation business anymore,” Mr. Pelliccio said. “We’re in the information business.” It was a striking thing to say about the classic New York task of handling seaborne cargo, an activity that, if only in the collective imagination, still remains connected to the grueling leg-and-shoulder work immortalized on film by Marlon Brando. The truth, of course, is that today’s port is driven more by brains than by brawn. Terminal workers speak a florid corporate language of “space optimization” and “key performance indicators.” Longshoremen click computer mice and complain about Microsoft Windows as everyone else in the white-collar world does. It is partly because of these mechanical and technological advances that the New York area ports are now booming, after the last few difficult years. In 2011, the six terminals in Brooklyn and New Jersey and on Staten Island handled the equivalent of 5.5 million container loads of cargo, more than at any point since New York was founded by the Dutch. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey estimates that this year will be just as busy, leading one former Port Authority economist to write in August that the city is in “striking distance” of reclaiming from Los Angeles the title of the country’s busiest trade zone. The history of the region’s port has always been marked by transformation, whether in 1825, when the Erie Canal was opened, allowing trade with the flourishing Midwest; or in 1956, when standardized containers began ushering out the era of winching unevenly shaped break-bulk cargo out of holds. Those at the port today agree that this is another moment ripe with change, even if they disagree about what that change will bring. The Panama Canal is scheduled to be widened in a few years, and the Port Authority will, by then, have spent the better portion of a $3.8 billion capital investment plan to attract its massive freighters, which will have nearly double the capacity of current cargo ships. Terminal executives, like Mr. Pelliccio, have spent an additional $1 billion on infrastructure improvements, eagerly joining the “arms race” for business out of Panama against rival ports in Long Beach, Calif.; Norfolk, Va.; and Savannah, Ga. While all this money and frenzied preparation have lent the port an atmosphere of energy, it ha
Re: [Marxism] Prostitution and socialism
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Dear comrades, I think this is a serious question. I think the solution--with prostitution and drug addiction--is to decriminalize them. Not to make them legal, and continue the exploitation, legally; but to treat these street crimes and addictions as a disease. And, of course, to demand jobs, education and other social services to help those who are caught up in these activities to get out of them. Certainly, jail is not the answer--it not only punishes the person in jail, putting their lives on hold, but it punishes their whole family. And even the decriminalization of these activities is not the final answer. The final answer, of course, is a world socialist revolution that would end the need to earn money off the misery of other fellow workers. The cause of drug addiction, prostitution and most other "crimes" carried out by the poor against the poor is the poverty enforced by the slavery of capitalism. Rich people steal from the poor and from each other. The poor don't steal from the rich in any significant way--they never get the chance. The wealth of the rich is protected by the state--the police, the military, etc. The question as to how a socialist organization should handle these issues is to demand the decriminalization of these behaviors and full, free social services for the rehabilitation of those involved. I don't agree that people don't know of the dangers of these activities or that it is "the party's" responsibility to point out the danger of these activities. Those who are in involved are well aware of the dangers but are in denial because they see it as their only road to survival. They put the dangers out of their minds out of psychological necessity! Because, the fact is, there are no alternatives for them, no free education or good-paying jobs available to them. Not to mention, that most of those who participate in these activities have already been deeply wounded by the very lives they were born into in this sick society of capitalist slavery. Many stood no chance of doing well in school or learning a good-paying trade. These people need extra social services to help them to realize their true potential. To make them see that they have all kinds of other abilities and talents. The drug addicted and the prostitute need more services, more help all across the board. Just like the schools that the children of the poor attend should have smaller classrooms, the very best teachers. They should have tutors and there should be aid to their families like free healthcare including eye and dental needs, good housing that meets the needs of each family, meals and childcare and activities for their children. Need I say that food, housing, education and healthcare should be free to all who need it! The role of "the party" (and by that I mean a revolutionary socialist party based upon the working class and its allies) should be to educate workers about how capitalism breeds exploitation, poverty and illness among the poor and, most of all, how we workers actually do have the power to change all this for the benefit of all! Basically, comrades, capitalism has to go! The only solution is world socialist revolution! And, there ain't much time left, folks! Comradely, Bonnie Weinstein On Jun 30, 2012, at 10:37 AM, Ken Ranney wrote: > == > Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. > == > > > > I am wondering about what should be the socialist attitude to prostitution in > general, and specifically in relation to the risk of disease from contact > with prostitutes. > > Recently I introduced a resolution to a convention of the Socialist Party of > Ontario. The resolution did not condemn prostitution but stipulated that an > SPO government would publicize the hazards associated with paid sexual > encounters while emphasizing the relatively high prevalence of sexually > transmitted diseases in people who trade sex for money. > > The reaction was as though I had touched a raw nerve. There was strong > condemnation and outright hostility. A more moderate member called for > referral of the resolution to a committee, and I moved that the motion be > tabled. . Both motions were resisted in no uncertain terms. > > The resolution was submitted because the media of the rich do not tell us of > the hazards of prostitution, and it seems to me an elementary kindness to > inform unsuspecting people. Kindness is an essential part of my agenda fo
[Marxism] Occupy Wall Street Affiliates Chain Subway Gates Open For Fare Strike
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Occupy Wall Street Affiliates Chain Subway Gates Open For Fare Strike By Nick Pinto Village Voice, March 29, 2012 http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2012/03/ occupy_wall_str_50.php A group calling itself the "Rank and File Initiative" claimed credit yesterday for opening up more than 20 subway stations throughout the city for free entry. Chaining open emergency gates at stations on the F, L, R, Q, 3, and 6 lines during rush hour yesterday morning, the anonymous activists posted signs designed to resemble MTA service-change announcements that read "Free Entry, No Fare. Please Enter Through The Service Gate." A press release claiming credit for the action said it was carried out by activists affiliated with Occupy Wall Street, as well as by rank-and-file members of Transit Workers Union Local 100, which is currently in negotiations with the Metropolitan Transit Authority. The release cites Albany's chronic underfunding of public transit, which has led the MTA to borrow heavily just to maintain its operating budget -- debt which must be serviced in part with transit fares that have gone up 50 percent over the last decade. "This means Wall Street bondholders receive a huge share of what we put into the system through the Metrocards we buy and the taxes we pay," the press statement reads. "More than $2 billion a year goes to debt service, and this number is expected to rise every year. If trends continue, by 2018 more than one out of every five dollars of MTA revenue will head to a banker's pockets." Last night we spoke with a representative of the Rank And File Initiative, who wished to remain anonymous. He told us that teams set out in the early hours of yesterday morning, disguising their identities, to lock open gates at roughly 25 stations. "It was three or four people to each station, so you can do the math of how many people were directly involved," he said. Not every team was successful -- one dispatched to a Bronx subway station had to abort their mission -- "But everyone came safely back without getting caught, which was our first priority." The source stressed that MTA station agents were not aware of the action, and no MTA employees were involved in actually locking the gates open. But that's not to say that Transit Workers Union members weren't involved. "We've been planning this for months -- Occupy people, other activists, and union members," the source said. "Union members were central to the planning. They told us the best places to go, they talked to their colleagues about what was going to happen, and not to be freaked out when we came in, and they gave the final green-light for the mission in the morning." Transport Workers Union Local 100 leadership denied knowledge of the action, and the Rank And File Initiative source confirmed that they were not notified. Relations between TWU 100 members and their leadership have long been strained, dating back to 2005 when union members, historically fairly radical, felt their leaders rolled over in a standoff with the MTA. "There are a lot of angry and afraid union members who wish they could do more, but they're held back by the leadership," the source said. "We listened in on a conference call with [TWU President John] Samuelson and the shop stewards, and they were all telling Samuelson the union needed to be doing more. He got so mad he was muting out whole parts of the conversation, until it was just him talking on the line." Yesterday's wildcat action -- carried out by union members without the knowledge or coordination of their leadership -- violated both the Taylor Law and the Taft-Hartley Act. It suggests that TWU 100 leaders may be losing control of their members, and also may lend some credence to claims by Occupy Wall Street organizers that labor's rank and file will take part in the upcoming May 1st "Day Without the 99 Percent" action, despite skeptical statements from some union leaders. The tactic isn't without precedent. San Francisco saw a fare strike in 2005, and the Spanish Indignados, to whom Occupy Wall Street protesters have often looked for inspiration, have been running their own fare strike, Yo No Pago, since early this year. The source said his group's inspiration for yesterdays action came on November 17 of last year. During that day of action for Occupy Wall Street, someone -- quite possibly members of Occupy's Direct Action Working Group -- locked open doors at four stations. "We wanted to do something like that, but scale it up," the source said. Going forward, the coalition is unlikely to repeat the fare strike tactic, the source said, though it will conduct othe
[Marxism] Patriot Act Being Used Against a 16 Year Old Boy & its Own Citizens!
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Patriot Act Being Used Against a 16 Year Old Boy & its Own Citizens! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9zGhYSIAP8&feature=youtube_gdata Patriot Act being used against its own citizens! Granville County, NC -- On March 5 at about 10:00 PM, ten heavily armed FBI agents, accompanied by three local police officers, stormed into the home of an American family and arrested a 16-year-old boy on charges he made numerous bomb threats. The boy, Ashton Lundeby, was taken from his family's North Carolina home, to a juvenile facility in Indiana where the threats were allegedly made. During the raid, the FBI executed a search warrant and thoroughly searched the family home. They found absolutely nothing illegal or suspicious. No bombs, no bomb-making material or anything unlawful. It turns out; someone hijacked the family's Internet IP address and used it to make numerous phone calls and terrorist threats. The family has been told they have no rights to see their child and, under the USA PATRIOT ACT, the child has no rights to even defend himself. They claim the Constitution does not apply to this 16-year- old, natural born, American citizen. THIS VIDEO IS NOT ABOUT IF ASHTON LUNDEBY MADE BOMB THREATS OR NOT! This story is about a serious violation of the Constitution by sworn officers of the government! Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A Meter So Expensive, It Creates Parking Spots -- in the City by the Bay
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A Meter So Expensive, It Creates Parking Spots [Just think--if they make parking meters $100.00 per hour--how many more parking spaces there would be for the 1/10th of the One Percent! Why not make it illegal for any person earning less than a million dollars a year to park anywhere in the city--then fine them their yearly pay if their car is found parked on the street; put them in jail if they can't pay their fine; and then to work without pay as prison labor! My oh my what creative thinkers these people are! Way to go to create parking spaces in this congested city! ...Bonnie Weinstein] By MICHAEL COOPER and JO CRAVEN McGINTY March 15, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/us/program-aims-to-make-the-streets- of-san-francisco-easier-to-park-on.html?ref=us SAN FRANCISCO — The maddening quest for street parking is not just a tribulation for drivers, but a trial for cities. As much as a third of the traffic in some areas has been attributed to drivers circling as they hunt for spaces. The wearying tradition takes a toll in lost time, polluted air and, when drivers despair, double-parked cars that clog traffic even more. But San Francisco is trying to shorten the hunt with an ambitious experiment that aims to make sure that there is always at least one empty parking spot available on every block that has meters. The program, which uses new technology and the law of supply and demand, raises the price of parking on the city’s most crowded blocks and lowers it on its emptiest blocks. While the new prices are still being phased in — the most expensive spots have risen to $4.50 an hour, but could reach $6 — preliminary data suggests that the change may be having a positive effect in some areas. Change can already be seen on a stretch of Drumm Street downtown near the Embarcadero and the popular restaurants at the Ferry Building. Last summer it was nearly impossible to find spots there. But after the city gradually raised the price of parking to $4.50 an hour from $3.50, high-tech sensors embedded in the street showed that spots were available a little more often — leaving a welcome space the other day for the silver Toyota Corolla driven by Victor Chew, a salesman for a commercial dishwasher company who frequently parks in the area. “There are more spots available now,” said Mr. Chew, 48. “Now I don’t have to walk half a mile.” San Francisco’s parking experiment is the latest major attempt to improve the uneasy relationship between cities and the internal combustion engine — a century-long saga that has seen cities build highways and tear them down, widen streets and narrow them, and make more parking available at some times and discourage it at others, all to try to make their downtowns accessible but not too congested. The program here is being closely watched by cities around the country. With the help of a federal grant, San Francisco installed parking sensors and new meters at roughly a quarter of its 26,800 metered spots to track when and where cars are parked. And beginning last summer, the city began tweaking its prices every two months — giving it the option of raising them 25 cents an hour, or lowering them by as much as 50 cents — in the hope of leaving each block with at least one available spot. The city also has cut prices at many of the garages and parking lots it manages, to lure cars off the street. It is too early to tell whether the program is working over all, but an analysis of city parking data by The New York Times found signs that the new rates are having the desired effect in some areas. While only a third of the blocks in the program have hit their targeted occupancy rates in any given month since the program began, the analysis found, three-quarters of the blocks either hit their targets or moved closer to the goal. The program has been a bit more successful on weekdays. Of course, price is only one factor that influences behavior. About a fifth of the time prices rose but more spaces filled up, or prices fell but fewer people parked. And the full effects of the phased-in price changes have yet to be felt, because the most expensive spots cannot hit the $6-an-hour maximum until next year at the earliest. Jay Primus, who manages the program for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said city was trying to reduce traffic and pollution and make parking easier — and not just to raise revenues. “We only need a few people to see there is a price difference and choose to park in a different location to open up just a few spaces here and there,” he said. Meters here can now charge different prices at different times of the
[Marxism] Free-Speech Argument in Appeal of Disbarred Lawyer’s Sentence
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Free-Speech Argument in Appeal of Disbarred Lawyer’s Sentence By COLIN MOYNIHAN February 29, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/nyregion/free-speech-is-cited-in- appeal-of-lynne-stewarts-10-year-sentence.html?ref=nyregion Throughout her long career, the disbarred lawyer Lynne F. Stewart has rarely minced words or stood mute. But her propensity for speaking her mind is now at the crux of an appeal of her 10-year sentence in federal prison. Ms. Stewart, known for defending unpopular clients and causes, was convicted in 2005 on five counts of providing material aid to terrorism and of lying to the government. A jury found that she had broken the rules to help her client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, communicate with his followers in the Islamic Group, an Egyptian organization with a history of terrorist violence. Judge John G. Koeltl of Federal District Court in Manhattan originally sentenced Ms. Stewart to 28 months in prison. But federal prosecutors appealed and pushed for a new sentence, claiming that Ms. Stewart had made public statements indicating a lack of remorse; she was then resentenced to 10 years in prison. “One of the most cherished policies of this nation is that everybody should be allowed to speak freely,” a lawyer for Ms. Stewart, Herald Price Fahringer, told a three-judge panel in United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Wednesday morning. “This case puts that principle to a very great test.” Mr. Fahringer said it had been “highly hazardous” for Judge Koeltl to consider Ms. Stewart’s statements outside of court in his sentencing decision. But he was interrupted by Judge Robert D. Sack, who said, “I’m not sure that freedom of speech means absolute immunity from the consequences of what you say.” A few minutes later, another judge, John M. Walker Jr., asked, “How else do you get a window into the character of the defendant?” The first of Ms. Stewart’s comments that are at issue came shortly after she received the 28-month sentence in 2006. Appearing before a throng of supporters in front of a courthouse in Lower Manhattan, she called the sentence “fair and right,” but then declared, “I can do that standing on my head.” A few days later, while appearing on the radio show “Democracy Now,” Ms. Stewart was asked by a reporter, Amy Goodman, if she regretted her conduct, and she replied, “I might handle it a little differently, but I would do it again.” The appeals panel sent the case back to Judge Koeltl for resentencing, citing the comments as well as assertions by federal prosecutors that Ms. Stewart had committed perjury and abused her position as a lawyer. In 2010, Judge Koeltl sentenced Ms. Stewart to 10 years in prison, ruling that she had lied and abused her position and writing that her statements indicated she viewed her 28-month sentence as trivial and that the sentence, therefore, did not “provide adequate deterrence.” Ms. Stewart’s lawyers argued that her reference to standing on her head was simply an expression of relief. And, they added, when she used the phrase “I would do it again,” she meant only that she would again represent Mr. Abdel Rahman, who was convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up buildings and tunnels in New York City. But prosecutors wrote in a brief that Judge Koeltl had interpreted Ms. Stewart’s comments accurately, adding that he had “observed a defiant and energized Stewart lecturing the government about its purported overreaching and mocking the sentence imposed.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Drones Set Sights on U.S. Skies
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Drones Set Sights on U.S. Skies By NICK WINGFIELD and SOMINI SENGUPTA February 17, 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/technology/drones-with-an-eye-on- the-public-cleared-to-fly.html?ref=business WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. — Daniel Gárate’s career came crashing to earth a few weeks ago. That’s when the Los Angeles Police Department warned local real estate agents not to hire photographers like Mr. Gárate, who was helping sell luxury property by using a drone to shoot sumptuous aerial movies. Flying drones for commercial purposes, the police said, violated federal aviation rules. “I was paying the bills with this,” said Mr. Gárate, who recently gave an unpaid demonstration of his drone in this Southern California suburb. His career will soon get back on track. A new federal law, signed by the president on Tuesday, compels the Federal Aviation Administration to allow drones to be used for all sorts of commercial endeavors — from selling real estate and dusting crops, to monitoring oil spills and wildlife, even shooting Hollywood films. Local police and emergency services will also be freer to send up their own drones. But while businesses, and drone manufacturers especially, are celebrating the opening of the skies to these unmanned aerial vehicles, the law raises new worries about how much detail the drones will capture about lives down below — and what will be done with that information. Safety concerns like midair collisions and property damage on the ground are also an issue. American courts have generally permitted surveillance of private property from public airspace. But scholars of privacy law expect that the likely proliferation of drones will force Americans to re- examine how much surveillance they are comfortable with. “As privacy law stands today, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy while out in public, nor almost anywhere visible from a public vantage,” said Ryan Calo, director of privacy and robotics at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University. “I don’t think this doctrine makes sense, and I think the widespread availability of drones will drive home why to lawmakers, courts and the public.” Some questions likely to come up: Can a drone flying over a house pick up heat from a lamp used to grow marijuana inside, or take pictures from outside someone’s third-floor fire escape? Can images taken from a drone be sold to a third party, and how long can they be kept? Drone proponents say the privacy concerns are overblown. Randy McDaniel, chief deputy of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department in Conroe, Tex., near Houston, whose agency bought a drone to use for various law enforcement operations, dismissed worries about surveillance, saying everyone everywhere can be photographed with cellphone cameras anyway. “We don’t spy on people,” he said. “We worry about criminal elements.” Still, the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups are calling for new protections against what the A.C.L.U. has said could be “routine aerial surveillance of American life.” Under the new law, within 90 days, the F.A.A. must allow police and first responders to fly drones under 4.4 pounds, as long as they keep them under an altitude of 400 feet and meet other requirements. The agency must also allow for “the safe integration” of all kinds of drones into American airspace, including those for commercial uses, by Sept. 30, 2015. And it must come up with a plan for certifying operators and handling airspace safety issues, among other rules. The new law, part of a broader financing bill for the F.A.A., came after intense lobbying by drone makers and potential customers. The agency probably will not be making privacy rules for drones. Although federal law until now had prohibited drones except for recreational use or for some waiver-specific law enforcement purposes, the agency has issued only warnings, never penalties, for unauthorized uses, a spokeswoman said. The agency was reviewing the law’s language, the spokeswoman said. For drone makers, the change in the law comes at a particularly good time. With the winding-down of the war in Afghanistan, where drones have been used to gather intelligence and fire missiles, these manufacturers have been awaiting lucrative new opportunities at home. The market for drones is valued at $5.9 billion and is expected to double in the next decade, according to industry figures. Drones can cost millions of dollars for the most sophisticated varieties to as little as $300 for one that can be piloted from an iPhone. “We see a huge potential market,” said Ben Gielow of the Association for
[Marxism] Factory Jobs Gain, but Wages Retreat
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Factory Jobs Gain, but Wages Retreat "'The trade-off is absolutely worth it; the alternatives are $15 an hour or zero dollars an hour,' Mayor Fischer said. ...'They were making $22 an hour and they are now making $15 an hour,' Ms. Thomas said, referring to a concessionary United Automobile Workers agreement. 'They were totally upset. But the alternative offered by the company was cut the wage scale or close the plant.'” [Remember: "General Electric Paid No Federal Taxes in 2010" By JAKE TAPPER (@jaketapper), THE WHITE HOUSE, March 25, 2011, http:// abcnews.go.com/Politics/general-electric-paid-federal-taxes-2010/ story?id=13224558 "In fact, GE got a $3.2 billion tax benefit." ...FYI, from Bonnie Weinstein] By LOUIS UCHITELLE December 29, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/business/us-manufacturing-gains- jobs-as-wages-retreat.html?ref=us LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Manufacturers are hiring again in America, softening a long slide in factory employment. But for a new generation of blue-collar workers, even those protected by unions, the price of employment is likely to be lower wages stretching to retirement. That is particularly true of global manufacturers like General Electric. With labor costs moving down at its appliance factories here, the company is bringing home the production of water heaters as well as some refrigerators, and expanding its work force to do so. The wages for the new hires, however, are $10 to $15 an hour less than the pay scale for hourly employees already on staff — with the additional concession that the newcomers will not catch up for the foreseeable future. Such union-endorsed contracts are also showing up in the auto industry, at steel and tire companies, and at manufacturers of farm implements and other heavy equipment, according to Gordon Pavy, president of the Labor and Employment Relations Association and, until recently, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s director of collective bargaining. “Some companies want to keep work here, or bring it back from Asia,” Mr. Pavy said, “but in order to do that they have to be competitive in the final prices of their products, and one way to be competitive is to lower the compensation of their American workers.” The shrunken pay scale for newcomers — $12 to $19 an hour versus $21 to $32 an hour for longtime workers — threatens to undo the middle- class status of even the best-paid blue-collar jobs still left in manufacturing. A similar contract limits the wages of new hires at a nearby Ford Motor Company stamping plant, but neither G.E.’s 2,000 hourly workers nor Ford’s 2,900, nor their unions nor the mayor, Greg Fischer, have objected. Quite the contrary, all argue that job creation must take precedence over holding the line on wages, given that the unemployment rate in this Ohio River city is above 9 percent and several thousand people apply for every unfilled, $13-an-hour factory job. “The trade-off is absolutely worth it,” Mayor Fischer said, arguing that while the city is actively subsidizing G.E.’s expansion here, mainly through tax rebates, that is not enough. “You must have a globally competitive wage to create jobs,” the mayor insisted. The generational setback implicit in a “globally competitive wage” is evident at G.E.’s Appliance Park, the complex of factories where G.E. makes refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers and other household appliances. Six years into the adoption of lower wages for new hires, half of the hourly workers are paid at the reduced scale. In an earlier era, that would have been a source of friction, perhaps protest. Now it isn’t, and in an interview William Masden, 62, earning $31.78 an hour after 42 years at Appliance Park, attempted an explanation. The younger workers still get annual raises, he noted, and by the time they top out, he and his peers — the oldest baby boomers — “won’t be here any longer to remind them of what they are missing.” Linda Thomas, 37, one of the first to be hired in 2005 under the new arrangement, amends that explanation. Her hourly wage, $18.19, has almost topped out, although it is nearly $14 an hour less than Mr. Masden’s. But she keeps silent. Too many unemployed people, she explained, would clamor for her job and her wage if she were to protest. “You don’t want to rock the boat,” Ms. Thomas said. “You take a chance on losing everything you have if you do.” Mr. Masden’s final years at G.E., doing safety checks, and Ms. Thomas’s willingness, however reluctant, to do equivalent work as a forklift driver at a much lower wage illustrate a big reason that General Electric decided to expan
[Marxism] Tax Benefits From Options as Windfall for Businesses
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Tax Benefits From Options as Windfall for Businesses "Thanks to a quirk in tax law, companies can claim a tax deduction in future years that is much bigger than the value of the stock options when they were granted to executives. This tax break will deprive the federal government of tens of billions of dollars in revenue over the next decade. And it is one of the many obscure provisions buried in the tax code that together enable most American companies to pay far less than the top corporate tax rate of 35 percent — in some cases, virtually nothing even in very profitable years." By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI December 29, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/business/tax-breaks-from-options-a- windfall-for-businesses.html?hp The stock market’s rebound from the financial crisis three years ago has created a potential windfall for hundreds of executives who were granted unusually large packages of stock options shortly after the market collapsed. Now, the corporations that gave those generous awards are beginning to benefit, too, in the form of tax savings. Thanks to a quirk in tax law, companies can claim a tax deduction in future years that is much bigger than the value of the stock options when they were granted to executives. This tax break will deprive the federal government of tens of billions of dollars in revenue over the next decade. And it is one of the many obscure provisions buried in the tax code that together enable most American companies to pay far less than the top corporate tax rate of 35 percent — in some cases, virtually nothing even in very profitable years. In Washington, where executive pay and taxes are highly charged issues, some critics in Congress have long sought to eliminate this tax benefit, saying it is bad policy to let companies claim such large deductions for stock options without having to make any cash outlay. Moreover, they say, the policy essentially forces taxpayers to subsidize executive pay, which has soared in recent decades. Those drawbacks have been magnified, they say, now that executives — and companies — are reaping inordinate benefits by taking advantage of once depressed stock prices. A stock option entitles its owner to buy a share of company stock at a set price over a specified period. The corporate tax savings stem from the fact that executives typically cash in stock options at a much higher price than the initial value that companies report to shareholders when they are granted. But companies are then allowed a tax deduction for that higher price. For example, in the dark days of June 2009, Mel Karmazin, chief executive of Sirius XM Radio, was granted options to buy the company stock at 43 cents a share. At today’s price of about $1.80 a share, the value of those options has risen to $165 million from the $35 million reported by the company as a compensation expense on its financial books when they were issued. If he exercises and sells at that price, Mr. Karmazin would of course owe taxes on the $165 million as ordinary income. The company, meanwhile, would be entitled to deduct the full $165 million as compensation on its tax return, as if it had paid that amount in cash. That could reduce its federal tax bill by an estimated $57 million, at the top corporate tax rate. SiriusXM did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Dozens of other major corporations doled out unusually large grants of stock options in late 2008 and 2009 — including Ford, General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Google and Starbucks — and soon may be eligible for corresponding tax breaks. Executive compensation experts say that barring another market collapse, the payouts to executives — and tax benefits for the companies — will run well into the billions of dollars in the coming years. Indeed, of the billions of shares worth of options issued after the crisis, only about 11 million have thus far been exercised, according to data compiled by InsiderScore, a consulting firm that compiles regulatory filings on insider stock sales. “These options gave executives a highly leveraged bet that stock prices would rebound from their 2008 and 2009 lows, and are now rewarding them for rising tides rather than performance,” said Robert J. Jackson Jr., an associate professor of law at Columbia who worked as an adviser to the office that oversaw compensation of executives at companies receiving federal bailout money. “The tax code does nothing to ensure that these rewards go only to executives who have created sustainable long-term value.” For some companies, awarding stock options can seem like a tempting bargain, since there is no cash outlay and the
[Marxism] Mumia Abu-Jamal is being held in Administrative Custody at SCI Mahanoy, Frackville, PA
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == From: i...@freemumia.com Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2011 11:52 AM To: mumia...@yahoogroups.com Subject: [MumiaNYC] MUMIA HAS BEEN TRANSFERRED TO SCI MAHANOY! Greetings all, Just verified with Superintendent John Kerestes that Mumia Abu- Jamal is being held in Administrative Custody at SCI Mahanoy, Frackville, PA until he is cleared to enter general population within a few days. We need phone calls to the institution to let them know that the WORLD is watching Mumia's movements and ask general questions so that they know that nothing they are doing is happening under cover of darkness. Please also send cards and letters to Mumia at the new address so that he begins receiving mail immediately and it is known to all of the people there that we are with him! PHONE NUMBER: 570-773-2158 MAILING ADDRESS: Mumia Abu-Jamal, #AM8335 SCI Mahanoy 301 Morea Road Frackville, PA 17932 CURRENT VISITORS on Mumia's list will allegedly be OK'd to visit once their names are entered into the computer at Frackville. NEW VISITORS will have to receive the pertinent forms directly from Mumia. DIRECTIONS TO THE PRISON are available at http:// www.cheapjailcalls.com/correctional-facility-directory/state-prison- directory/item/sci-mahanoy PLEASE HELP SPREAD THE WORD!!! __._,_.___ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] An Open Letter from America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == An Open Letter from America’s Port Truck Drivers on Occupy the Ports By Leonardo Mejia, Yemane Berhane, Xiomara Perez, Abdul Khan, Ramiro Gotay of Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports We are the front-line workers who haul container rigs full of imported and exported goods to and from the docks and warehouses every day. We have been elected by committees of our co-workers at the Ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle, Tacoma, New York and New Jersey to tell our collective story. We have accepted the honor to speak up for our brothers and sisters about our working conditions despite the risk of retaliation we face. One of us is a mother, the rest of us fathers. Between the five of us we have 11children and one more baby on the way. We have a combined 46 years of experience driving cargo from our shores for America’s stores. We are inspired that a non-violent democratic movement that insists on basic economic fairness is capturing the hearts and minds of so many working people. Thank you “99 Percenters” for hearing our call for justice. We are humbled and overwhelmed by recent attention. Normally we are invisible. Today’s demonstrations will impact us. While we cannot officially speak for every worker who shares our occupation, we can use this opportunity to reveal what it’s like to walk a day in our shoes for the 110,000 of us in America whose job it is to be a port truck driver. It may be tempting for media to ask questions about whether we support a shutdown, but there are no easy answers. Instead, we ask you, are you willing to listen and learn why a one-word response is impossible? We love being behind the wheel. We are proud of the work we do to keep America’s economy moving. But we feel humiliated when we receive paychecks that suggest we work part time at a fast-food counter. Especially when we work an average of 60 or more hours a week, away from our families. There is so much at stake in our industry. It is one of the nation’s most dangerous occupations. We don’t think truck driving should be a dead-end road in America. It should be a good job with a middle-class paycheck like it used to be decades ago. We desperately want to drive clean and safe vehicles. Rigs that do not fill our lungs with deadly toxins, or dirty the air in the communities we haul in. Poverty and pollution are like a plague at the ports. Our economic conditions are what led to the environmental crisis. You, the public, have paid a severe price along with us. Why? Just like Wall Street doesn’t have to abide by rules, our industry isn’t bound to regulation. So the market is run by con artists. The companies we work for call us independent contractors, as if we were our own bosses, but they boss us around. We receive Third World wages and drive sweatshops on wheels. We cannot negotiate our rates. (Usually we are not allowed to even see them.) We are paid by the load, not by the hour. So when we sit in those long lines at the terminals, or if we are stuck in traffic, we become volunteers who basically donate our time to the trucking and shipping companies. That’s the nice way to put it. We have all heard the words “modern- day slaves” at the lunch stops. There are no restrooms for drivers. We keep empty bottles in our cabs. Plastic bags too. We feel like dogs. An Oakland driver was recently banned from the terminal because he was spied relieving himself behind a container. Neither the port, nor the terminal operators or anyone in the industry thinks it is their responsibility to provide humane and hygienic facilities for us. It is absolutely horrible for drivers who are women, who risk infection when they try to hold it until they can find a place to go. The companies demand we cut corners to compete. It makes our roads less safe. When we try to blow the whistle about skipped inspections, faulty equipment, or falsified logs, then we are “starved out.” That means we are either fired outright, or more likely, we never get dispatched to haul a load again. It may be difficult to comprehend the complex issues and nature of our employment. For us too. When businesses disguise workers like us as contractors, the Department of Labor calls it misclassification. We call it illegal. Those who profit from global trade and goods movement are getting away with it because everyone is doing it. One journalist took the time to talk to us this week and she explains it very well to outsiders. We hope you will read the enclosed article “How Goldman Sachs and Other Companies Exploit Port Truck Drivers.” But the short answer to the question: Why are companies like SSA Marine, the Seattle-based global terminal oper
[Marxism] ‘Law & Order: SVU’ Imitation Occupation Draws Real Protesters, and City’s Ire
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == ‘Law & Order: SVU’ Imitation Occupation Draws Real Protesters, and City’s Ire "...Show us the script..." [Occupy TV -- way to go! ...bw] By JAMES BARRON and COLIN MOYNIHAN December 9, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/nyregion/law-order-svu-imitation- occupation-draws-real-protesters-and-citys-ire.html?ref=nyregio “Law & Order” helped give the phrase “ripped from the headlines” as much of a place in the consciousness of New York as detectives’ chatter about “perps” and “vics.” Or that clang-clang noise at the beginning of each scene in the television show. But when the “Law & Order: SVU” production crew began setting up for a scene in Foley Square in Lower Manhattan on Thursday night, some of the people who actually generated the headlines that “SVU” was preparing to rip from — the Occupy Wall Street protesters — were less than pleased. They, in turn, generated some headlines that “SVU” did not want to rip from — it turned out that the “SVU” crew did not have a permit to be there. “SVU” is not the only prime-time television drama that has worked in material about the Occupy protests, or has tried to. On “The Good Wife” last Sunday night, Julianna Margulies’s character had a brainstorm as an arbitration hearing droned on. She rushed out of the hearing room and used a cellphone to snap a shot of a bulletin-board poster that said, “Support Occupy Wall Street.” Later still, Ms. Margulies had a scene opposite Michael J. Fox playing a lawyer who mentioned his “mean corporate clients.” “The 1 percent,” he added. The “SVU” brouhaha began when the crew put up tarps and tents in the square, in the shadow of the courthouse at 60 Centre Street, a familiar backdrop for the step-climbing prosecutors in the “Law & Order” universe. The crew tacked up placards denouncing war and greed. It installed a library with rows of books and a kitchen, complete with a sign that read, “End the War on Workers.” All in all, the crew transformed Foley Square into a fake encampment that looked like the real one a few blocks away, in Zuccotti Park, which the police cleared on Nov. 15. But the tents and the anticorporate slogans came down before the cameras could roll, done in by real Occupy Wall Street protesters who saw the set as a stage for political theater. They streamed onto the set at midnight, stepping over yellow tape and brushing off objections from production assistants. Some crawled into the tents and lay down. Others danced while pounding drums and waving flags. Several headed straight to the kitchen, where they helped themselves to muffins and a jar of pickles, among other things. Some complained about art imitating life, and about unfairness. “We thought we would bring some extras down and add some reality to this show,” Aaron Black, 38, of Brooklyn, said. “Why should they be able to put tents up in a public park when we are unable to do that?” Drew Hornbein, 24, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, said he found it “bizarre” to walk through an imitation occupation. He wondered whether the “SVU” producers had realized that a fake tent city would be a target for Occupy protesters. “Did they think we were gone?” he said. Before long, a contingent of police officers gathered. A commander said that everyone near the tents had to move on or face arrest, protesters and production assistants alike. This was after he said the permit for the set had been rescinded — something that turned out to be not quite right. On Friday, the city said “SVU” did not have a permit to build the encampment, only a permit for filming beginning at 8 a.m. Friday. For a while, the protesters stayed where they were. Eventually, they adjourned to a fountain at the southern end of the square and began holding a meeting. The police remained on the set, and workers from “SVU” began dismantling the tents. Curt King, a spokesman for NBC Universal, said on Friday that the network had no comment about the occupation of the apparently rule- breaking set; neither did a spokeswoman for “SVU.” They did not explain how “SVU” would rework the scene. But Warren Leight, an executive producer of “Law & Order: SVU,” posted a series of messages on Twitter that began, “Saddened by last night’s events.” “We understand OWS emotions run high,” Mr. Leight said, “and also protesters’ fear of having their images and history co-opted by corporate media — the irony here is the scene we couldn’t shoot portrayed OWS in a sympathetic light.” In another post he said, “And harassing night-shift production assistants. Those are not the images of OWS we wanted our audience to see.” “Let’s move forward,” he added. “Peace.” The posts were
[Marxism] Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution “Until folks know what the state’s going to do, people aren’t going to take the risk and come forward,” she said. One woman who submitted her name fears it will become public. In a recent interview in her small home in Lexington, N.C., she said she would be embarrassed if her co-workers at a local hospital knew her story. Now 62, she was adopted but sent to a state school at 7 because her parents thought she was mentally deficient. She remembers being told as a teenager that she was getting an appendectomy. When she was 27 and started having uterine trouble, a doctor requested her records and discovered that she had been sterilized in an operation that had been botched, her medical records show. 'I tell you what,' she said. 'I about hit the floor.' She went to her mother, who said she was going to tell her before she got married. Welfare would have ended if she had not consented, her mother said." ...Elaine Riddick, 57, who also lives in Atlanta, was sterilized in 1967. She was 14 and had gotten pregnant from a rape. Social workers persuaded her illiterate grandmother to sign the consent form with an X." December 9, 2011 By KIM SEVERSON http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/us/redress-weighed-for-forced- sterilizations-in-north-carolina.html?ref=us LINWOOD, N.C. — Charles Holt, 62, spreads a cache of vintage government records across his trailer floor. They are the stark facts of his state-ordered sterilization. The reports begin when he was barely a teenager, fighting at school and masturbating openly. A social worker wrote that he and his parents were of “rather low mentality.” Mr. Holt was sent to a state home for people with mental and emotional problems. In 1968, when he was ready to get out and start life as an adult, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina ruled that he should first have a vasectomy. A social worker convinced his mother it was for the best. “We especially emphasized that it was a way of protecting Charles in case he were falsely accused of having fathered a child,” the social worker wrote to the board. Now, along with scores of others selected for state sterilization — among them uneducated young girls who had been raped by older men, poor teenagers from large families, people with epilepsy and those deemed to be too “feeble-minded” to raise children — Mr. Holt is waiting to see what a state that had one of the country’s most aggressive eugenics programs will decide his fertility was worth. Although North Carolina officially apologized in 2002 and legislators have pressed to compensate victims before, a task force appointed by Gov. Bev Perdue is again wrestling with the state’s obligation to the estimated 7,600 victims of its eugenics program. The board operated from 1933 to 1977 as an experiment in genetic engineering once considered a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool. Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs. Virginia and California each sterilized more people than North Carolina. But no program was more aggressive. Only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization. They often relied on I.Q. tests like those done on Mr. Holt, whose scores reached 73. But for some victims who often spent more time picking cotton than in school, the I.Q. tests at the time were not necessarily accurate predictors of capability. For example, as an adult Mr. Holt held down three jobs at once, delivering newspapers, working at a grocery store and doing maintenance for a small city. Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace Kuralt, the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt. A proponent of birth control in all forms, Mr. Kuralt used the program extensively when he was director of the Mecklenburg County welfare department from 1945 to 1972. That county had more sterilizations than any other in the state. Over all, about 70 percent of the North Carolina operations took place after 1945, and many of them were on poor young women and racial minorities. Nonwhite minorities made up about 40 percent of those sterilized, and girls and women about 85 percent. The program, while not specifically devised to target racial minorities, affected black Americans disproportionately because they were more often poor and uneducated and from large rural families. “The state owes something to the vict
[Marxism] More Radioactive Water Leaks at Japanese Plant
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == More Radioactive Water Leaks at Japanese Plant "The Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety in France estimates that between March and mid-July, the amount of radioactive cesium 137 that had leaked into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi plant amounted to 27.1 petabecquerels, the greatest amount known to have been released from a single episode. (A becquerel is a frequently used measure of radiation, and a petabecquerel is a million billion becquerels.)" By HIROKO TABUCHI and MARTIN FACKLER December 4, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/world/asia/more-leaks-from- fukushima-daiichi-nuclear-plant.html?ref=world TOKYO — At least 45 tons of highly radioactive water have leaked from a purification facility at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, and some of it may have reached the Pacific Ocean, the plant’s operator said Sunday. Nearly nine months after Fukushima Daiichi was ravaged by an earthquake and tsunami, the plant continues to pose a major environmental threat. Before the latest leak, the Fukushima accident had been responsible for the largest single release of radioactivity into the ocean, threatening wildlife and fisheries in the region, experts have said. The new radioactive water leak called into question the progress that the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, appeared to have made in bringing its reactors under control. The company, known as Tepco, has said that it hopes to bring the plant to a stable state known as a cold shutdown by the end of the year. The trouble on Sunday came in two stages, a Tepco statement said. In the morning, utility workers found that radioactive water was pooling in a catchment next to a purification device; the system was switched off, and the leak appeared to stop. But the company said it later discovered that leaked water was escaping, possibly through cracks in the catchment’s concrete wall, and was reaching an external gutter. In all, as much as 220 tons of water may now have leaked from the facility, according to a report in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun that cited Tepco officials. The company said that the water had about one million times as much radioactive strontium as the maximum safe level set by the government, but appeared to have already been cleaned of radioactive cesium before leaking out. Both elements are readily absorbed by living tissue and can greatly increase the risk of developing cancer. Tepco said a check on Saturday had found no sign of the leak, suggesting that it began Saturday night or early Sunday morning. The company said it was exploring ways to stop any more water from escaping. Since the disaster in March, workers have been struggling to cool the stricken plant’s reactors by flooding them with water, which is contaminated with radioactivity in the process and becomes a problem of its own. Tepco installed a new circulatory cooling system in September with filters that decontaminate and recycle the cooling water. But the company acknowledges that some water has already leaked into the ocean, and thousands of tons of water remain in the flooded basements of the plant’s reactor buildings. The Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety in France estimates that between March and mid-July, the amount of radioactive cesium 137 that had leaked into the Pacific from the Fukushima Daiichi plant amounted to 27.1 petabecquerels, the greatest amount known to have been released from a single episode. (A becquerel is a frequently used measure of radiation, and a petabecquerel is a million billion becquerels.) Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Nuclear Detonation Timeline "1945-1998"
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Nuclear Detonation Timeline "1945-1998" The 2053 nuclear tests and explosions that took place between 1945 and 1998 are plotted visually and audibly on a world map. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9lquok4Pdk&feature=share&mid=5408 Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] The New Digital Divide
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The New Digital Divide "According to numbers released last month by the Department of Commerce, a mere 4 out of every 10 households with annual household incomes below $25,000 in 2010 reported having wired Internet access at home, compared with the vast majority — 93 percent — of households with incomes exceeding $100,000. Only slightly more than half of all African-American and Hispanic households (55 percent and 57 percent, respectively) have wired Internet access at home, compared with 72 percent of whites." By SUSAN P. CRAWFORD December 3, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/opinion/sunday/internet-access-and- the-new-divide.html?ref=opinion FOR the second year in a row, the Monday after Thanksgiving — so- called Cyber Monday, when online retailers offer discounts to lure holiday shoppers — was the biggest sales day of the year, totaling some $1.25 billion and overwhelming the sales figures racked up by brick-and-mortar stores three days before, on Black Friday, the former perennial record-holder. Such numbers may seem proof that America is, indeed, online. But they mask an emerging division, one that has worrisome implications for our economy and society. Increasingly, we are a country in which only the urban and suburban well-off have truly high-speed Internet access, while the rest — the poor and the working class — either cannot afford access or use restricted wireless access as their only connection to the Internet. As our jobs, entertainment, politics and even health care move online, millions are at risk of being left behind. Telecommunications, which in theory should bind us together, has often divided us in practice. Until the late 20th century, the divide split those with phone access and those without it. Then it was the Web: in 1995 the Commerce Department published its first look at the “digital divide,” finding stark racial, economic and geographic gaps between those who could get online and those who could not. “While a standard telephone line can be an individual’s pathway to the riches of the Information Age,” the report said, “a personal computer and modem are rapidly becoming the keys to the vault.” If you were white, middle-class and urban, the Internet was opening untold doors of information and opportunity. If you were poor, rural or a member of a minority group, you were fast being left behind. Over the last decade, cheap Web access over phone lines brought millions to the Internet. But in recent years the emergence of services like video-on-demand, online medicine and Internet classrooms have redefined the state of the art: they require reliable, truly high-speed connections, the kind available almost exclusively from the nation’s small number of very powerful cable companies. Such access means expensive contracts, which many Americans simply cannot afford. While we still talk about “the” Internet, we increasingly have two separate access marketplaces: high-speed wired and second-class wireless. High-speed access is a superhighway for those who can afford it, while racial minorities and poorer and rural Americans must make do with a bike path. Just over 200 million Americans have high-speed, wired Internet access at home, and almost two-thirds of them get it through their local cable company. The connections are truly high-speed: based on a technological standard called Docsis 2.0 or 3.0, they can reach up to 105 megabits per second, fast enough to download a music album in three seconds. These customers are the targets for the next generation of Internet services, technology that will greatly enhance their careers, education and quality of life. Within a decade, patients at home will be able to speak with their doctors online and thus get access to lower-cost, higher-quality care. High-speed connections will also allow for distance education through real-time videoconferencing; already, thousands of high school students are earning diplomas via virtual classrooms. Households will soon be able to monitor their energy use via smart- grid technology to keep costs and carbon dioxide emissions down. Even the way that wired America works will change: many job applications are already possible only online; soon, job interviews will be held by way of videoconference, saving cost and time. But the rest of America will most likely be left out of all this. Millions are still offline completely, while others can afford only connections over their phone lines or via wireless smartphones. They can thus expect even lower-quality health services, career opportunities, education and entertainment options than they already receive. True, Ame
[Marxism] What Must Be Done Next -- Open Discussion in Socialist Viewpoint magazine
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Dear all, Below is a presentation by Nat Weinstein, Editor of Socialist Viewpoint magazine, that is intended as an introduction to an open discussion in the pages of Socialist Viewpoint on what is needed in the anti-capitalist, workers' movement in the U.S. today. It appears in our current issue, November/December 2011 Vol. 11, No. 6, at socialistviewpoint.org. Serious contributions to this discussion will be considered for publication in the January/February 2012 issue of Socialist Viewpoint, Vol. 12, No. 1, by the Editorial Board of Socialist Viewpoint. Please send articles to: i...@socialistviewpoint.org or directly to me at gio...@comcast.net. The deadline for articles for the January/February issue is Monday, December 21. Articles received after this date will be considered for the March/April issue, Vol. 12, No. 2. If you have questions or need further information you can contact me at: gio...@comcast.net or call me at: 415-824-8730 In solidarity, Bonnie Weinstein, for Socialist Viewpoint magazine *-*-*-*-*-*-* *-*-*-*-*-*-* What Must Be Done Next A Presentation by Nat Weinstein to the Editorial Committee of Socialist Viewpoint, November 7, 2011 http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/ Though all of us have spent our lives trying to build the kind of mass revolutionary party that led the Russian workers to victory in the October Revolution, we are now smaller than we have ever been before. But even so, we must take into account that our tendency which could be called, Cannonist1 Trotskyism, once numbered in the hundreds reaching a pinnacle of around 1,500 around the time I joined the SWP in 1945, and once again in the mid-1970s. Now, to make a very long story that we all know short, we are now too small to even function as an organized political organization. What holds us together is our magazine, and small as we are, we try to function as a potential nucleus of a mass revolutionary workers party by participating as a tendency in the mass movement. But we are hardly an exception to the rule. All self-described revolutionary socialist tendencies have also shrunk. However, there are many more who have gone our separate ways while still claiming to be the nucleus of a mass revolutionary party. As you all know, I tend to be more optimistic than most. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am oblivious to how much the odds seem to be against us. They are huge. Even so, we have something going for us, which is far more powerful than our most powerful enemies and opponents—history is on our side! Just a glance at the world today speaks louder than thousands of words. And I don’t have to tell you what it means to us here in this room today. With world capitalism and its imperialist ruling classes facing the broadest and deepest economic crisis in world history, the relation of class forces is on its way toward shifting away from the ruling classes and castes, and towards the workers of the world and their natural allies coming together to fight for their common interests. This promises to become a tidal shift, of tsunami proportions, in the class relation of forces. As most everyone knows, the tide of history has been running against us since shortly after the Second World War, when global capitalism decided in 1944, with the allied victory in sight, to adopt Keynesian economic policies. This set into motion more than 60 years of false capitalist prosperity. In fact, there can be little doubt that this artificially contrived period of relative capitalist equilibrium is over and cannot be brought back to life. But as long as capitalism lives, the ruling class will use every means at its disposal to keep itself alive. On the other hand, we cannot deny that though there is no permanent solution to global capitalism’s economic, political and military crises, the ruling class will still try to extend its life span by further slashing mass living standards. This is their only way to raise the falling average rate of profit high enough to postpone their inevitable collapse for as long as possible. The capitalist class has been successful for longer than we had imagined possible. And, it will continue to squeeze the working class and their natural allies until there is a revolutionary response and the working class emerges as the leading force in this new global uprising. A large number of the unemployed have already joined the objectively anti-capitalist occupy movement. But they are not necessarily acting in the name of their class. Rather, they see themselv
[Marxism] Occupy Oakland Calls for TOTAL WEST COAST PORT SHUTDOWN ON 12/12
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == On Nov 20, 2011, at 3:30 PM, Bonnie Weinstein wrote: Occupy Oakland Calls for TOTAL WEST COAST PORT SHUTDOWN ON 12/12 Posted 21 hours ago on Nov. 19, 2011, 8:35 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt http://occupywallst.org/article/occupy-oakland-calls-total-west- coast-port-shutdow/ Proposal for a Coordinated West Coast Port Shutdown, Passed With Unanimous Consensus by vote of the Occupy Oakland General Assembly 11/18/2012: In response to coordinated attacks on the occupations and attacks on workers across the nation: Occupy Oakland calls for the blockade and disruption of the economic apparatus of the 1% with a coordinated shutdown of ports on the entire West Coast on December 12th. The 1% has disrupted the lives of longshoremen and port truckers and the workers who create their wealth, just as coordinated nationwide police attacks have turned our cities into battlegrounds in an effort to disrupt our Occupy movement. We call on each West Coast occupation to organize a mass mobilization to shut down its local port. Our eyes are on the continued union-busting and attacks on organized labor, in particular the rupture of Longshoremen jurisdiction in Longview Washington by the EGT. Already, Occupy Los Angeles has passed a resolution to carry out a port action on the Port Of Los Angeles on December 12th, to shut down SSA terminals, which are owned by Goldman Sachs. Occupy Oakland expands this call to the entire West Coast, and calls for continuing solidarity with the Longshoremen in Longview Washington in their ongoing struggle against the EGT. The EGT is an international grain exporter led by Bunge LTD, a company constituted of 1% bankers whose practices have ruined the lives of the working class all over the world, from Argentina to the West Coast of the US. During the November 2nd General Strike, tens of thousands shutdown the Port Of Oakland as a warning shot to EGT to stop its attacks on Longview. Since the EGT has disregarded this message, and continues to attack the Longshoremen at Longview, we will now shut down ports along the entire West Coast. Participating occupations are asked to ensure that during the port shutdowns the local arbitrator rules in favor of longshoremen not crossing community picket lines in order to avoid recriminations against them. Should there be any retaliation against any workers as a result of their honoring pickets or supporting our port actions, additional solidarity actions should be prepared. In the event of police repression of any of the mobilizations, shutdown actions may be extended to multiple days. In Solidarity and Struggle, Occupy Oakland -In Oakland: the West Coast Port Shutdown Coordinating Committee will meet on General Assembly days at 5pm before the GA to organize the local shutdown, and to network with other occupations. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Redefining the Union Boss
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Redefining the Union Boss “Ms. Pope later found a better-paying job at a warehouse in Cleveland, as a member of the Teamsters. In 1979, when Teamster steel haulers in Canton, Ohio, went on strike, she helped expand that action throughout the Midwest. Before long, she was driving an 18- wheeler, hauling steel from Cleveland to Baltimore. After the birth of her first child, however, she traded her rig for the bargaining table, and began negotiating local contracts. When Ron Carey, a parcel truck driver from Queens, ran on an anticorruption platform and captured the presidency of the Teamsters, a union that had been long notorious for Mafia connections, Ms. Pope became an international representative for the union’s warehouse unit. By then, she had settled in Montclair, N.J. Seven years later, Mr. Carey left after he was accused of misusing union funds. (A court later found him not guilty.) Ms. Pope then joined Teamsters Local 805 in Queens. There, she ran against its incumbent president and won, becoming the head of the 1,100-member local in 2005." By KATHLEEN SHARP November 19, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/business/women-are-becoming-unions- new-voices.html?ref=business NOT long ago, truckers pulled off highways across America and tuned in to someone whose CB handle was “Troublemaker.” “I’m barely hanging on,” one driver lamented. His employer, the U.P.S. freight unit, was turning to nonunion drivers — people outside the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, he said. “We need to start enforcing our contracts!” Troublemaker replied. Troublemaker, better known as Sandy Pope, is the first woman to run for the presidency of the Teamsters, against the powerful, three-term incumbent, James P. Hoffa. Yes, Hoffa. Odds are that Ms. Pope will lose — final results are due today. But whatever the outcome, Ms. Pope represents a new face of labor, one that increasingly is female. In this “We are the 99 percent” moment, when corporate profits are up and wages flat, a handful of women are challenging the old, mostly male world of union bosses. Unions, of course, have been in retreat for years. But Ms. Pope and several other women, notably Rose Ann DeMoro, of National Nurses United, and Mary Kay Henry, of the Service Employees International Union, are pushing back. Their ascendance has rekindled hope that organized labor maybe, just maybe, could stage a comeback. They have also helped inspire the likes of Occupy Wall Street. “Some of these women might even make unions relevant to the average American again,” said Steve Early, a labor journalist, union organizer and author of “The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor.” That, anyway, is labor’s hope. All three women are pushing the old boundaries, and some are engaging traditional foes like anti-union managers and Republicans in Washington and beyond. From Big Rig to Bargaining Ms. Pope is an unlikely firebrand. Her father was an investment banker, and she grew up in comfortable surroundings in a Boston suburb. But then she dropped out of Hampshire College and ended up working for minimum wage as an attendant at a psychiatric hospital. When co-workers groused about wages, she organized a strike — and won. “I saw how empowered people felt when they had control over their lives,” she recalled. Ms. Pope later found a better-paying job at a warehouse in Cleveland, as a member of the Teamsters. In 1979, when Teamster steel haulers in Canton, Ohio, went on strike, she helped expand that action throughout the Midwest. Before long, she was driving an 18-wheeler, hauling steel from Cleveland to Baltimore. After the birth of her first child, however, she traded her rig for the bargaining table, and began negotiating local contracts. When Ron Carey, a parcel truck driver from Queens, ran on an anticorruption platform and captured the presidency of the Teamsters, a union that had been long notorious for Mafia connections, Ms. Pope became an international representative for the union’s warehouse unit. By then, she had settled in Montclair, N.J. Seven years later, Mr. Carey left after he was accused of misusing union funds. (A court later found him not guilty.) Ms. Pope then joined Teamsters Local 805 in Queens. There, she ran against its incumbent president and won, becoming the head of the 1,100-member local in 2005. When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York tried to convert shipping piers in Red Hook, Brooklyn, into luxury residences and tourist attractions, Ms. Pope called on other unions, neighborhood groups and local leaders to try to block the move. At stake, she said, were hundreds of midwage, non-Teamster jobs. After three year
[Marxism] Copwatch catches cops red-handed infiltrating Occupy Oakland -- amazing
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The November 2 Occupy Oakland general strike was fantastically successful. There were at least 30-40,000 people who came out in full force to shut down the Port of Oakland--and that we did. It was overwhelmingly peaceful and jubilant. The so-called violence that took place can be explained by the following video exposé: Copwatch is a group that keeps track of police violence, etc. They have shown in this video that the cops are infiltrating the occupiers. Cops are shown in plain clothes--dressed in black clothes, by the way--and then again in police uniform. There's no question they are one and the same as you will see in the video footage. Comradely, Bonnie Weinstein, socialistviewpoint.org Copwatch@Occupy Oakland: Beware of Police Infiltrators and Provocateurs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvMzqopHH0 Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Judge Fines Longshore Union $250,000 Over Tactics
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Judge Fines Longshore Union $250,000 Over Tactics By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS September 30, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/09/30/business/AP-US-Union- Clash.html?src=busln TACOMA, Wash. (AP) — A federal judge fined a Longshore union $250,000 on Friday for its tactics in a Longview labor dispute, and he warned that individual protesters could face their own penalties for future violations of his orders. U.S. District Judge Ronald Leighton has already held the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in contempt for blocking a train and storming a grain terminal earlier this month. Authorities have said the protesters in the second incident overpowered security guards, damaged railroad cars and dumped grain. "What's going on out there is awful," Leighton said. "We have to do something about it, and I'm going to do something." The National Labor Relations Board had asked the court to fine the union more than $290,000 to cover the damages and expenses such as overtime for law enforcement agencies. Leighton said he rounded down to be cautious and ordered additional penalties for future violations, including $25,000 for the union, $5,000 for union officers and $2,500 for other individuals. The union plans to appeal the decision, attorney Robert Remar said after the hearing. He had argued that the union has the right to assess whether the proposed damages and expenses were proper, saying that he believes some of them were excessive and inflated. Repeatedly facing arrest, the protesters in Longview have viewed themselves as being the latest front in the struggle for American jobs and benefits during the economic downturn. The dispute has continued to escalate, with protesters resorting to aggressive tactics that have been a rarity in recent labor disputes around the country. Union protesters believe they have the right to work at a new grain terminal at the Port of Longview that is currently being staffed by workers from a different union, Oregon-based Operating Engineers Local 701. Leighton is scheduled to address the larger dispute, focused on different interpretations of port contracts, in a hearing later Friday. Mike Baker can be reached at http://twitter.com/MikeBakerAP . Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Florida: Few Drug Users Among Welfare Applicants
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Florida: Few Drug Users Among Welfare Applicants "The results have prompted Carl Hiaasen, the Florida columnist and author, to suggest that the people who came up with the law should be the ones submitting specimens." [Boy Oh Boy would I like to see the results of that drug test....Bonnie Weinstein] By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS September 27, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/us/florida-few-drug-users-among- welfare-applicants.html?ref=us Preliminary figures compiled under a new state law requiring drug tests for welfare applicants show that they are less likely than other people to use drugs, not more. The results have prompted Carl Hiaasen, the Florida columnist and author, to suggest that the people who came up with the law should be the ones submitting specimens. Mr. Hiaasen, saying “there is a certain public interest in going after hypocrisy,” has offered to pay for drug testing for all 160 members of the Florida Legislature. The figures show that about 2.5 percent of up to 2,000 applicants for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families have tested positive since the law went into effect in July. An additional 2 percent declined to take the test. The Justice Department estimates that 6 percent of Americans 12 and older use illegal drugs. Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, and other supporters of the law say the tests will save money by weeding out people who would use welfare money to buy drugs. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] A Tryout Program for the Unemployed
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == A Tryout Program for the Unemployed [Work for free for eight weeks while collecting YOUR unemployment insurance money and maybe you'll get hired! That's the "tryout program!" Unbelievable! And only 18 percent of those who completed the program have been hired Who's making out with this program?? Eight free weeks of labor for the bosses! bw] By SHAILA DEWAN September 23, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/business/economy/georgia-jobs- program-draws-federal-attention.html?ref=business ATLANTA — Desperate to find a way to get the nation’s long-term unemployed back to work, President Obama and Republican leaders are supporting the expansion of a novel jobs program in Georgia to any other state that wants it. Whether the program can be replicated on a scale big enough to make a dent in the unemployment rate, though, is far from clear. Since the recession began, the Georgia program has been held up as a national example, and a close look shows that it has pleased employers and produced steady paychecks for workers. But economists say there is little evidence that participants find work faster. And a lack of promotion, limited oversight and budget constraints have limited the program, Georgia Works, to a tiny portion of the state’s nearly half a million unemployed workers. Only about 120 people have been hired because of it this year. That such a blip of success has been hailed as a central plank of the president’s jobs plan, and one of the few with consistent bipartisan support, shows just how few viable solutions have emerged for perhaps the nation’s most intractable problem — how to get 14 million unemployed people working again. Already replicated by several other states, the Georgia initiative does not create jobs but allows workers to try out an existing position, unpaid, while continuing to receive unemployment benefits. At the end of eight weeks, the employer may take the worker on permanently. The program is voluntary, and participants may not work more than 24 hours a week. Since the program began in 2003, only 18 percent of those who completed the training have been hired by the employer that trained them, according to data released this week by the state labor department. More recently, job placement has declined to about 10 percent. New Hampshire, North Carolina and Missouri report far better results from their programs, though they are still quite small. The Obama administration estimates that if every state opted in, the program would cost $1 billion to $1.5 billion. Supporters of the effort say that hirings are not the only measure of success. The program keeps the unemployed tethered to a workplace environment. It can provide training — under federal labor laws that forbid unpaid labor, it is required to, though the state labor department’s literature refers to it as a “free trial” for employers. Still, the program has given Lis Cap, 26, who lost her job as a graphic designer in August, the chance to acquire a valuable skill: writing code for smartphone apps. On a recent morning, she sat at a laptop in the dining room that serves as headquarters for a small technology company called AppedOn. From an iPad screen, an AppedOn programmer based in Asheville, N.C., coached her. “It’s a great opportunity for me to learn all I can about this area that I was interested in but had no solid experience in,” said Ms. Cap, who taught herself to build Web sites but needed help when it came to apps. “Without this, this would not be a job that I could apply for.” It also might not be a job that AppedOn could fill, said Sosh Howell, the chief executive. App writers are in short supply, even at salaries of $40,000 to $50,000 a year. “It’s so hard to find people,” he said, “that our options come down to training someone, which is something we can’t afford as a small business, or outsourcing to another country, which is not our preferred method.” At the end of eight weeks, Mr. Howell will either hire Ms. Cap, or she will walk away with what she considers valuable training that she could not have gained any other way. At Georgia State University, however, the story is different. Georgia State has hired 37 workers through the program, out of 54 who have begun trial periods. But the overseers of the program there acknowledged that for many, the program was more valuable as a foot in the door than as a learning experience. One auditioner was so proficient at Microsoft Access that she showed her prospective bosses how to improve their system. She was hired. Another employee, Belinda Robinson, said she had repeatedly sent her résumé to Georgia State but
[Marxism] Chatham County District Attorney Larry Chisolm -- President Obama -- STOP THE EXECUTION OF TROY DAVIS
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == *-*-*-*-*-*-* Send a letter to Chatham County District Attorney stop the execution of Troy Davis: https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy? cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=333 Send a letter to President Obama to take action to save the life of Troy Davis: https://secure2.convio.net/pep/site/Advocacy? cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=335 National Headquarters - 202-265-1948 - i...@answercoalition.org Boston - 857-334-5084 - bos...@answercoalition.org Los Angeles - 213-251-1025 - answe...@answerla.org San Francisco - 415-821-6545 - ans...@answersf.org *-*-*-*-*-*-* Here's my letter to President Obama. I sent a similar letter to the Chatham County DA Larry Chisolm...Bonnie Weinstein Dear President Obama, I implore you to intercede and stop the execution of Troy Davis. There is no good that can come from this murderous act--I believe Troy Davis is innocent! But in any case, an eye for an eye makes both men blind! There is so much doubt surrounding this case including the fact that Davis was convicted mainly on eyewitness testimony--known to be unreliable--and, with no physical evidence connecting him to the tragic shooting of Officer Mark MacPhail. And, if that isn't enough, seven of the nine eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony pointing to police intimidation and threats if they didn't finger Troy Davis. Five have even signed statements saying they were coerced by police to testify against Davis.Of the two who didn't recant, one is said to have confessed to the shooting of Officer McPhail himself to at least three other witnesses! Even the former director of the FBI has said that this execution is an injustice and should not go forward. Just today the New York Times ran another editorial urging a halt to the execution. And, Georgia Senate Democratic Whip Vincent Fort and Southern Center for Human Rights Executive Director Sara Totonchi have issued a joint statement calling upon the individuals charged with carrying out the execution to refuse to participate in the killing of a possibly innocent man. In fact, the Justice Department has launched civil rights violations investigations linked to police misconduct recently in Seattle, Cleveland, and Newark, New Jersey. Obviously such violations do occur. You have the power to halt this injustice and stop the execution of Troy Davis now. I can't imagine what it feels like to have such power. I only pray to God that you make the right choice--the choice of life over death! Please stop this execution now! You must take action. Stop the execution of an innocent man. Sincerely, Bonnie Weinstein *-*-*-*-*-*-* You can also try to call Judge Penny Freesemann at 912 652 7252. (I tried to call but the line was busy.) Or you can Fax Judge Freesemann at 912 652-7254. *-*-*-*-*-*-* Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] My Thoughts on The Debt Ceiling Debate Scam
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == My Thoughts on The Debt Ceiling Debate Scam By Jack Heyman Sept/Oct 2011 http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/sepoct_11/sepoct_11_03.html Socialist Viewpoint is initiating a discussion based on the article, “Notes on the Debt Ceiling Debate Scam,” by Lynn Henderson that appears in this issue. There is no doubt that the commanders of U.S. capital will escalate their havoc on the lives and living conditions of workers across the globe. There is no end to their wars or to the cutbacks they will impose on the workers. Henderson’s article has opened a dialogue on the state of the current world capitalist economic crisis; a realistic assessment of the state of the anti-capitalist, Socialist and Communist left; and what it will take for the working class to fightback and win. We welcome serious contributions to this discussion such as this one. —The Editors The main focus of Lynn Henderson’s article, “Notes on the Debt Ceiling Debate Scam,” seems to be the bankruptcy of Stalinism, portraying it as the “biggest defeat of the working class.” I’d say that title goes to the fall of the Soviet Union, the degenerated workers state. Capitalism and imperialism have had nearly a free hand to wreak havoc in resource rich third world countries. Furthermore, in the developed countries they’ve had virtually no challenge to their austerity programs, not so much by the miniscule Stalinist parties but by the mass social democratic parties, especially in Europe’s soft underbelly, Greece, Spain and Portugal. China, the deformed workers state headed by a Stalinist party, has been navigating through a dangerous capitalist passage, accumulating tremendous wealth during this period of a world capitalist credit crisis at the expense of the Chinese working class. Obviously I disagree with Henderson’s characterization of China as capitalist and see the possibility of a political revolution there. I’d also point out that there’s been some resistance to oppressive capitalist policies as in France, where the working class organized successful strikes against the government’s attempt to raise the retirement age. French dockers unions were actually able to keep their retirement age even lower than the national pension age. It required coordinated militant dockers strikes inflamed by the government’s attempt to make them work longer at an especially dangerous job. Also on the U.S. West Coast the longshore union was able to organize 1) the first ever strike against an imperialist war in this country on May Day 2008, 2) the first ever strike against the bloody Zionist state, 3) the Bay Area ports shutdown last October against the police killing of a young black man, Oscar Grant, and finally 4) this year another ports shutdown here in solidarity with the besieged state workers in Wisconsin—all were defiant actions against both the International union bureaucrats and the maritime employers. The employers are suing ILWU Local 10 for this last action, trying to quell the union’s militancy. Yes, there’s a lack of class struggle in general in the world. I’m neither blind nor a Pollyanna. But there’s a pervasive, building anger amongst workers because of the oppressive capitalist austerity programs. This gives Trotskyists a golden opportunity to expose the machinations of pro-capitalist union leaders and the bankruptcy of capitalism and its social democrat and Stalinist props. What’s lacking is a class struggle leadership in the trade unions to break from the Democrats here and a revolutionary workers party in the international working class to coordinate struggles on a worldwide basis. Jack Heyman is a retired longshoreman and rank and file leader of local 10, ILWU. —July 25, 2011 Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] England: Working Class Youth Erupt in Anger
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == England: Working Class Youth Erupt in Anger By Graham Durham Sept/Oct 2011 http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/sepoct_11/sepoct_11_22.html The police killing of Mark Duggan, a 29-year-old Tottenham man, August 4 sparked the largest ever rebellion by working-class youth in England. Unlike the events in Brixton and other Black population centers in 1981 and 1985, the events of the four nights from August 6-10 spread to all parts of England with at least eight different protests across London and in twelve different towns and cities. The protests were marked by the participation of thousands of young people from all ethnic backgrounds united in their hostility to the state which has failed them and the police who are the agents imposing oppression. The huge Tory media machine in Britain, still reeling from proven scandals of Murdoch staff illegally phone-tapping victims and celebrities and bribing police, have worked overtime to deny any political or social cause for the protests. This desperate attempt to portray the rebellion as mere looting and greed by so-called “moral degenerates” is proving a massive failure as huge questions about the conditions of working-class young people have sharpened. It is the failing capitalist system itself which is increasingly seen as the cause of the anger among young people. Initially police and their lame agency, the Independent Police Complaints Commission, claimed that Mark Duggan had fired a shot at police but later conceded that only two police shots had been fired, one killing Mark and the other police shot lodging in a police radio. Mark Duggan’s family were not told of the death in the first forty- eight hours after the incident and at a peaceful protest at Tottenham police station the family were ignored. Only after this did street protests begin. As so often, in the UK and USA, it was police brutality and subsequent conduct that sparked the rebellion. Poverty and unemployment Tottenham in north London is a microcosm of areas of the United Kingdom where the additional impact of the worldwide banker-led recession has produced increased poverty. Tottenham has the highest level of unemployment in London at 8.3 percent and over 40 percent of young people live in official poverty. The Tory/Liberal Democrat government has worsened this position—for example, imposing local council cuts resulting in eight of twelve youth clubs closing this year in Haringey, the borough, which includes Tottenham. A week after the protests, and with over 1,000 arrests in London alone, the worst unemployment figures since the Tories were last in government were announced. One of four young people aged 16-24 have no work or training and over 400, 000 Londoners are unemployed. The killing of Mark Duggan, a Black man, by police echoes the unexplained death of the reggae artist Smiley Culture in south London earlier in the year. Black young people are 26-times more likely to be stopped and searched by police and this racist practice has not ceased despite endless reports following notorious police racism including the failure of the police to charge any of the five racists known to have murdered Stephen Lawrence in south London and stretching back to the police killing of Cynthia Jarrett which caused the Brixton protests thirty years ago. The Tottenham protests sparked four nights of similar protests across England in Liverpool, Manchester, Leicester, Nottingham, West Bromwich, Birmingham, Bristol and spreading to smaller towns such as Washington New Town in the northeast, Gillingham and Reading in the southeast and Gloucester in the southwest. Significantly, several of the protests involved attacks on police stations. Many of these areas have very low Black populations and demonstrate that the overall cause of these protests is the hopeless position many young people are in as a result of the recession. This is a worldwide phenomenon facing the working-class, and the Arab spring revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, the protests in Greece, Spain and Ireland have the same cause —the insistence of the ruling class that workers must pay for the failings of the banking system. In the United Kingdom these attacks have hit young people the hardest with the Cameron government coalition removing entirely the Education Maintenance Allowance, which enabled 630,000 of the poorest students to afford to attend college. Additionally, the tripling of university fees, which led to violent protests in 2010, has made higher education unaffordable for most working-class youth. By cutting off the future and with no work available, protests were only a matter of when, not if.
[Marxism] Pelican Bay and Tottenham: Lessons Learned from Two Struggles
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Pelican Bay and Tottenham: Lessons Learned from Two Struggles By Bonnie Weinstein Sept/October 2011 http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/sepoct_11/sepoct_11_05.html Conditions were so inhumane at the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in California that prisoners began a 20-day hunger strike on July 1, 2011. Although the strike is officially over, the hunger strikers were and still are pressing for opportunities “to engage in self-help treatment, education, religious and other productive activities...”— opportunities that are routinely denied. Examples of “privileges” the prisoners wanted are, one phone call per week and permission to have sweat suits and watch caps. (Often warm clothing is denied, though the cells and exercise cage can be bitterly cold.) All of the “privileges” mentioned in the demands are already allowed at other SuperMax prisons in the federal prison system and in other states.1 As of July 21 California Prison Focus confirmed that the hunger strike leaders at Pelican Bay had entered into an agreement with California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) officials…to end their hunger strike in exchange for a major policy review of SHU housing conditions; gang validation process; and the debriefing process.2 And as of July 27, the CDCR had implemented three changes: permission to have wall calendars; to have watch-cap ‘beanies;’ and to resume correspondence courses paid for by the prisoners themselves with the CDRC agreeing to provide the opportunity for someone to proctor their final exams.3 Victory for one is a victory for all This courageous strike by prison inmates—not just in Pelican Bay but in prisons throughout California—not only has exposed the torture that is taking place in prisons throughout the U.S. on a daily basis, but has succeeded in actually winning some demands! Their struggle has begun under the best of circumstances—a victory through solidarity action—however modest. Tottenham Things did not turn out so well for young English workers who spontaneously lashed out, en masse, against the abhorrent conditions in which they are forced to live. According to an article that appears in this issue of Socialist Viewpoint, the proverbial “last straw” was reached August 4 in England when a Black man, 29-year-old, unarmed, Mark Duggan, was murdered by police, which “…sparked the largest ever rebellion by working-class youth in England. Unlike the events in Brixton and other Black population centers in 1981 and 1985, the events of the four nights from August 6-10 spread to all parts of England with at least eight different protests across London and in twelve different towns and cities.” The response of the British Government was expressed in the words of Prime Minister David Cameron, “This is not about poverty, it’s about culture—a culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities…” And what does Cameron do? “Mr. Cameron repeated earlier statements that the police were authorized to use plastic-coated bullets against rioters. …While he agreed with objections by the police to the deployment of the army to confront any future unrest, he said the authorities would consider whether the military could fulfill any functions to allow more police officers to be deployed. ‘Nothing should be off the table. Every contingency is being looked at…’” As to the causes of the outbreak, he returned to his earlier theme of the social and moral breakdown of youth who have chosen criminal behavior instead of work.4 Ruthless punishment of the poor According to an August 12, 2011 article in the New York Times by John F. Burns titled, “British Leader Seeks Public Housing Evictions for Rioters and Their Families:” “…the government of Prime Minister David Cameron put forward on Friday [August 12] a new way of punishing the looters and vandalsâ €¦kick them and their families out of their government-subsidized homes.” Cameron’s rationale for this is that the “rioting” is “criminality, pure and simple.” When asked whether this would render them homeless, he replied, “They should have thought of that before they started burgling.” Further, according to the same article: “The communities minister, Eric Pickles, a right-wing Conservative, was blunter still in another BBC appearance. Saying it was not time to ‘pussyfoot around’ with the lawbreakers…focusing on scrapping a rule that allows for the eviction from subsidized housing of people who commit crimes in their own neighborhoods in favor of a broader measure that would allow
[Marxism] Labor Witchhunts and Their Effects in California
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Labor Witchhunts and Their Effects in California By Howard Keylor Sept/Oct 2011 http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/sepoct_11/sepoct_11_11.html The following is based on remarks made by Howard Keylor as part of a panel discussion on the 1940s and ’50s, and the early 1960s witchhunts in California. This panel was the first of the events of the July LaborFest program in the Northern California Bay Area. Keylor focused his remarks on the political context of the witchunt period. He is a retired member of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and was a leader of the ILWU work stoppage against a ship carrying apartheid South African cargo in San Francisco in 1984. I am glad that this discussion of the witchhunts of the late 1940s and the 1950s is focused upon the working class and its institutions, the trade unions and the left working class political parties and movements. Contrary to most of the books and movies about the witchhunts, the main victim was the working class. You have only to read Len Decaux’s book, Labor Radical, to learn how tens-of-thousands of workers were driven out of their jobs and subjected to public demonization. Len had been the CIO’s publicity director until he was purged. He traveled across the U.S. working at a series of printing jobs as he was followed by the FBI and fired from one job after another. Even naturalized U.S. workers had their citizenship revoked and were deported. This was a time of great fear—a time of capitulation and betrayal. But it was also a time of great courage and intransigent resistance. The attacks on the left were motivated largely by the perceived need of the capitalist class to drive the left out of the trade unions and to isolate the left from the working class. In this, the bourgeoisie and their government were successful. We have suffered from that defeat of our class up to the present where it is painfully clear that the working class and the oppressed have no effective organization or leadership to resist the current attacks. The massive strike wave of 1946, the most extensive in U.S. history, shocked the capitalists. Even though the Communist Party had opposed those strikes, even expelling trade unionists who opposed that policy, the capitalists saw the Communist Party as a potential threat. They could not forget the role of the Communist Party in the mass union struggles of the 1930s. The Northern California CIO, which was influenced by the ILWU, opposed the 1946 Oakland General Strike. Taft-Hartley The 1947 Taft-Hartley slave-labor law was a major step in the direction of emasculating the trade unions. Taft Hartley outlawed any member of the Communist Party from holding top union office. In order to utilize the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in representation elections, union leaders had to sign non-Communist affidavits. A number of union officials who resigned from the Communist Party and signed those affidavits were tried and convicted for perjury. These convictions were usually obtained with perjured information from government witnesses. I recommend reading False Witness, by Harvey Mattusov. His perjured testimony was instrumental in convicting Clint Jencks, an International Representative of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (MM&SWU). He later revealed in this book that he had been induced by the Justice Department to lie. For that recantation Harvey Mattusov was himself convicted and jailed for perjury. The Justice Department officials who had coached Mattusov to lie were not indicted nor tried and convicted. The Taft Hartley prosecutions of MM&SWU effectively wrecked the union’s ability to function. The Taft Hartley non-Communist affidavits were seen as a green light to the CIO to expel 11 left-led unions in 1948. These expelled unions contained about a million workers and constituted approximately 20 percent of the entire number of workers in the CIO. Who remembers the FTA (Food Tobacco and Agricultural Workers Union), FE (Farm Equipment Workers Union) or the ACA (American Communications Association)? The anti-communist witchhunts were a justification to the CIO and to the AFL to carry out raids against these unions, leading to the destruction and dismemberment of all but two of them. Although the United Electrical Workers Union lost about 90 percent of its membership, it did survive. The only union which survived with its core membership intact was the ILWU. Driven out Utilizing the Magnuson Act, which required all maritime union members to apply for and possess a Coast Guard Pass, the sea-going unions were purged of all of their leftists and milita
[Marxism] Troy Davis, Racism, The Death Penalty & Labor
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Troy Davis, Racism, The Death Penalty & Labor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEues_-KoZU&feature=youtube_gdata_player Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Stop the Execution of Troy Davis -- innocent man on death row -- Georgia
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Please feel free to forward I just received this letter from Troy in the mail and wanted to share it with everybody in it’s entirety. At first I wondered why the penmanship was sort of scrawled. Then I read his note and I understood. He had to write it using the inside of a pen. They have taken everything from him except his eyeglasses. Yet his call to action is strong and mighty. Marlene Martin Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP) For more info on Troy and on the Global day of action go to our website at www.nodeathpenalty.org Hello Marlene, I received your letter. However they took all of my mail, address book and the only property I have is my eyeglasses. I’m writing with the filter of a pen because I’m not allowed the entire pen. With all these security rules they only allowed me to write down your address. I don’t remember everything you said in your letter but I wanted to thank you, your family and CEDP for everything. It is time for action so please encourage everyone to reach out to politicians, ministers, and grassroots organizations to contact the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole and Governor to grant me relief and stop this scheduled execution. Get involved in this movement to put an end to the death penalty. Come to Georgia and take a stand for Justice. Let them know I’m blessed and my faith in God is stronger than ever. Now we have a chance to join together and be heard loud and clear that Georgia needs to stop this execution of an innocent man and end the death penalty all together. Excuse my writing but its hard using the funnel only. God bless you and keep up the great work you’re doing. Sincerely Troy Davis URGENT! ACT NOW! TROY DAVIS IS TO BE EXECUTED ON MIDNIGHT, SEPTEMBER 21, 2011! http://www.naacp.org/content/main We've just received terrible news: The state of Georgia has set Troy Davis's execution date for midnight on September 21st, just two weeks from today. This is our justice system at its very worst, and we are alive to witness it. There is just too much doubt. Even though seven out of nine witnesses have recanted their statements, a judge labeled his own ruling as "not ironclad" and the original prosecutor has voiced reservations about Davis's guilt, the state of Georgia is set to execute Troy anyway. Time is running out, and this is truly Troy's last chance for life. But through the frustration and the tears, there is one thing to remain focused on: We are now Troy Davis's only hope. And I know we won't let him down. There are three steps you can take to help Troy: 1. Send a message of support to Troy as he fights for justice on what may be the final days of his life: http://action.naacp.org/LettersOfSupport 2. Sign the name wall, if you haven't already. And if you have, send it to your friends and family. Each name means a more united front for justice: http://action.naacp.org/Name-Wall 3. Make sure everyone knows about this injustice. Spread the word on Facebook and Twitter (using the hashtag #TooMuchDoubt) so that Troy Davis's story can be heard. We still have a chance to save his life, but only if people are willing to speak out against injustice. Today, the state of Georgia has declared their intention to execute a man even though the majority of the people who put him on the row now say he is innocent and many implicate one of the other witnesses as the actual killer. Now that a date has been set, we cannot relent. We must redouble our efforts. Thank you. Please act quickly and forward this message to all who believe the justice system defeats itself when it allows a man to be executed amid so much doubt. Ben Benjamin Todd Jealous President and CEO NAACP Troy Davis Case: Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SH4IpmJl6M&NR=1 http://www.youtube.com/embed/ 5SH4IpmJl6M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> Troy Davis Case: Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajDmdDl-FhM&feature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/embed/ ajDmdDl-FhM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> Troy Davis Case: Part Three: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mcraX7yq_0&feature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/embed/ 9mcraX7yq_0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> Troy Davis Case: Part Four: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJxudiudK4c&feature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/embed/ BJxudiudK4c" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> www.justicefortroy.org Here are the mailing addresses for both the Bd. of Pardons and the Georgia Gov. for folks who will write snail mail appeals for Troy Davis. Mailing Addresses: State Board of Pardons and Paroles 2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE Suite 458, Balcony Level, East Tower Atlanta, Georgia 30334-4909 Telephone: (40
[Marxism] Detroit Sets Its Future on a Foundation of Two-Tier Wages
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Detroit Sets Its Future on a Foundation of Two-Tier Wages By BILL VLASIC September 12, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/business/in-detroit-two-wage-levels- are-the-new-way-of-work.html?ref=business DETROIT — They are a cornerstone of Chrysler’s unlikely comeback: 900 employees turning out a Jeep Grand Cherokee S.U.V. every 48 seconds of the working day at an assembly plant here. Nothing distinguishes them from the other workers at the Jefferson North plant, except their paychecks. The newest Chrysler workers earn about $14 an hour, compared with double that amount for longtime employees on the same shift. With the economy slumping and job creation once again a pressing issue in the White House and Congress, the advent of a two-tier wage system in Detroit is spiking employment for one of the country’s most important manufacturing industries. For many, the opportunity for steady employment is welcome, even at a lower wage. “Everybody is appreciative of a job and glad to be working,” said Derrick Chatman, who makes $14.65 an hour putting tires on Jeeps after being laid off at Home Depot, working odd construction jobs and collecting unemployment. What was once seen as a desperate move to prop up the struggling auto industry is now considered an integral part of its future. The demand for $14-an-hour manufacturing jobs is providing Detroit’s Big Three automakers with a ready pool of eager new employees. Last year, Chrysler was flooded with inquiries about the jobs here, and it froze the list after receiving 10,000 applications. The companies say the two-tier wages are paying off. Despite the disparity, there is no appreciable difference in the Grand Cherokees produced on the shift dominated since last fall by the lower-paid workers, the plant manager says. At General Motors, the savings from its two-tier workers are crucial to production that began last month of an inexpensive, subcompact car, the Chevrolet Sonic, in suburban Detroit. Two-tier wage systems have been tried in the airline industry and others with spotty success. Usually the lower wages disappear rather quickly when the economy picks up. But the arrival of vastly different wage rates in auto factories is a seminal event in an industry long influenced by a powerful union devoted to equal pay regardless of seniority. The new jobs, which are seen as long term, are being watched closely by economists, executives in other industries and Washington policy makers eager to increase employment in manufacturing and other areas. “This is not going away,” said Kristin Dziczek, a labor analyst at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., a research organization. “It has allowed the Big Three to reduce labor costs without cutting the pay of incumbent workers. Is it good for the health and competitiveness of the companies? Yes. And is that good for job security? Yes.” Four years ago, the United Automobile Workers agreed to allow Chrysler, G.M. and Ford to pay lower wages to new hires to help close the cost gap with foreign carmakers. Now the two-tier arrangement is at the forefront of labor talks between the U.A.W. and the Detroit companies. The union’s president, Bob King, has made an increase in entry-level wages a top priority in negotiations for a new national contract to replace the current agreement, which expires on Wednesday. So far, about 12 percent of Chrysler’s 23,000 union workers earn the lower wage, and over all, 4,000 or so of the 112,000 U.A.W. members are second-tier hires. Those numbers are expected to grow — and in fact can increase significantly even under the current contract. The jobs are central to the contract talks now because they are viewed as a critical element of the industry’s continued recovery. The benefits for the lower-tier workers are scaled back as well. They get a maximum of four weeks paid time off a year, versus five for the longtime workers. And instead of the guaranteed $3,100-a-month pension a full-paid worker receives after age 60, the new hires have to build their own “personal retirement plan” based on contributions from the company of less than $2,000 a year. The gap in wages between regular and entry-level workers has created some dissent in the U.A.W.’s ranks. Some long-term employees have demonstrated against the two-tier system and called for it to be abolished. Mr. King, however, has focused on getting meaningful pay raises for the lower tier rather than eliminating it. At the big Labor Day parade in Detroit, union activists chanted “equal pay for equal work,” and some full-paid workers said they were willing to forgo a wage increase i
[Marxism] Rich Tax Breaks Bolster Makers of Video Games
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Rich Tax Breaks Bolster Makers of Video Games "All told, the federal government gave $123 billion in tax incentives to corporations in 2010, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, with breaks for groups and people as diverse as Nascar track owners, mohair producers, hedge fund managers, chicken farmers, automakers and oil companies. Many tax policy analysts say the breaks for the video game industry — whose domestic sales of $15 billion a year now exceed those of the music business — are a vivid example of a tax system that defies common sense. ...Video game industry officials say that by improving technology, they are indirectly helping society at large. Dean Zerbe, national managing director at Alliantgroup, said that the military had used some video game technology to train soldiers and pilots." [UN-BE-LIEV-ABLE!!! ...bw] By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI September 10, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/11/technology/rich-tax-breaks-bolster- video-game-makers.html?ref=business The United States government offers tax incentives to companies pursuing medical breakthroughs, urban redevelopment and alternatives to fossil fuels. It also provides tax breaks for a company whose hit video game this year was the gory Dead Space 2, which challenges players to advance through an apocalyptic battlefield by killing space zombies. Those tax incentives — a collection of deductions, write-offs and credits mostly devised for other industries in other eras — now make video game production one of the most highly subsidized businesses in the United States, says Calvin H. Johnson, who has worked at the Treasury Department and is now a tax professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Because video game makers straddle the lines between software development, the entertainment industry and online retailing, they can combine tax breaks in ways that companies like Netflix and Adobe cannot. Video game developers receive such a rich assortment of incentives that even oil companies have questioned why the government should subsidize such a mature and profitable industry whose main contribution is to create amusing and sometimes antisocial entertainment. For example, Electronic Arts of Redwood City, Calif., shipped more than two million copies of Dead Space 2 in the game’s first week on the market this year. It shows a total of $1.2 billion in global profits the last five years using an accounting method that management says captures its operating profits. But largely because of deferred revenue, deductions for executive stock options and a variety of accounting requirements, the company officially reports a net loss for the period. And the company reports that it paid out $98 million in cash for taxes worldwide in those years. Neither corporations nor the government make tax returns public, and the information most companies disclose in their regulatory filings is insufficient to determine how much they pay in federal taxes and how that compares to the official United States corporate rate of 35 percent. All told, the federal government gave $123 billion in tax incentives to corporations in 2010, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, with breaks for groups and people as diverse as Nascar track owners, mohair producers, hedge fund managers, chicken farmers, automakers and oil companies. Many tax policy analysts say the breaks for the video game industry — whose domestic sales of $15 billion a year now exceed those of the music business — are a vivid example of a tax system that defies common sense. Most times, subsidies begin as a way to nurture a fledgling industry that will not be profitable for years or to encourage a business activity deemed to have a broad benefit to society, like reducing pollution or improving public health. But it’s a lot easier to create a tax break than to eliminate it. That leaves a generous assortment of tax incentives available to all types of companies, like Electronic Arts, with skilled accounting departments. Electronic Arts has also lobbied successfully for more tax assistance. The architect of the company’s strategies in recent years was Glen A. Kohl, a tax lawyer colorful enough to publicly compare himself to Bruce Springsteen and to joke in the pages of The Wall Street Journal that his dog, Rubin, shared the name of the Treasury secretary under whom he served (Robert E. Rubin). After working in the Treasury Department during the Clinton administration, Mr. Kohl entered the private sector and became head of E.A.’s tax department in 2004, leading the company as it aggressively lobbied for a federal tax break on domestic production and s
[Marxism] The Strike That Busted Unions
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The Strike That Busted Unions By JOSEPH A. McCARTIN August 2, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/reagan-vs-patco-the-strike- that-busted-unions.html?hp Washington THIRTY years ago today, when he threatened to fire nearly 13,000 air traffic controllers unless they called off an illegal strike, Ronald Reagan not only transformed his presidency, but also shaped the world of the modern workplace. More than any other labor dispute of the past three decades, Reagan’s confrontation with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or Patco, undermined the bargaining power of American workers and their labor unions. It also polarized our politics in ways that prevent us from addressing the root of our economic troubles: the continuing stagnation of incomes despite rising corporate profits and worker productivity. By firing those who refused to heed his warning, and breaking their union, Reagan took a considerable risk. Even his closest advisers worried that a major air disaster might result from the wholesale replacement of striking controllers. Air travel was significantly curtailed, and it took several years and billions of dollars (much more than Patco had demanded) to return the system to its pre-strike levels. But the risk paid off for Reagan in the short run. He showed federal workers and Soviet leaders alike how tough he could be. Although there were 39 illegal work stoppages against the federal government between 1962 and 1981, no significant federal job actions followed Reagan’s firing of the Patco strikers. His forceful handling of the walkout, meanwhile, impressed the Soviets, strengthening his hand in the talks he later pursued with Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Yet three decades later, with the economy shrinking or stagnant for nearly four years now and Reagan’s party moving even further to the right than where he stood, the long-term costs of his destruction of the union loom ever larger. It is clear now that the fallout from the strike has hurt workers and distorted our politics in ways Reagan himself did not advocate. Although a conservative, Reagan often argued that private sector workers’ rights to organize were fundamental in a democracy. He not only made this point when supporting Lech Walesa’s anti-Communist Solidarity movement in Poland; he also boasted of being the first president of the Screen Actors Guild to lead that union in a strike. Over time, however, his crushing of the controllers’ walkout — which he believed was justified because federal workers were not allowed under the law to strike — has helped undermine the private-sector rights he once defended. Workers in the private sector had used the strike as a tool of leverage in labor-management conflicts between World War II and 1981, repeatedly withholding their work to win fairer treatment from recalcitrant employers. But after Patco, that weapon was largely lost. Reagan’s unprecedented dismissal of skilled strikers encouraged private employers to do likewise. Phelps Dodge and International Paper were among the companies that imitated Reagan by replacing strikers rather than negotiating with them. Many other employers followed suit. By 2010, the number of workers participating in walkouts was less than 2 percent of what it had been when Reagan led the actors’ strike in 1952. Lacking the leverage that strikes once provided, unions have been unable to pressure employers to increase wages as productivity rises. Inequality has ballooned to a level not seen since Reagan’s boyhood in the 1920s. Although he opposed government strikes, Reagan supported government workers’ efforts to unionize and bargain collectively. As governor, he extended such rights in California. As president he was prepared to do the same. Not only did he court and win Patco’s endorsement during his 1980 campaign, he directed his negotiators to go beyond his legal authority to offer controllers a pay raise before their strike — the first time a president had ever offered so much to a federal employees’ union. But the impact of the Patco strike on Reagan’s fellow Republicans has long since overshadowed his own professed beliefs regarding public sector unions. Over time the rightward-shifting Republican Party has come to view Reagan’s mass firings not as a focused effort to stop one union from breaking the law — as Reagan portrayed it — but rather as a blow against public sector unionism itself. In the spring, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin invoked Reagan’s handling of Patco as he prepared to “change history” by stripping public employees of collective bargaining rights in a party-line vote. “I’m no
[Marxism] N.R.C. Lowers Estimate of How Many Would Die in Meltdown
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == N.R.C. Lowers Estimate of How Many Would Die in Meltdown [Or, “Don’t worry. Be happy. Not too many of us will die”….Bonnie Weinstein] “Big releases of radioactive material would not be immediate, and people within a 10-mile radius would have enough time to evacuate, the study found. The chance of a death from acute radiation exposure within 10 miles is therefore near zero, the study projects, although some people would receive doses high enough to cause fatal cancers in decades to come. … One person in every 4,348 living within 10 miles would be expected to develop a ‘latent cancer’ as a result of radiation exposure, compared with one in 167 in previous estimates.” By MATTHEW L. WALD July 29, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/science/earth/30radiation.html?hp ROCKVILLE, Md. — The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is approaching completion of an ambitious study that concludes that a meltdown at a typical American reactor would lead to far fewer deaths than previously assumed. The conclusion, to be published in April after six years of work, is based largely on a radical revision of projections of how much and how quickly cesium 137, a radioactive material that is created when uranium is split, could escape from a nuclear plant after a core meltdown. In past studies, researchers estimated that 60 percent of a reactor core’s cesium inventory could escape; the new estimate is only 1 to 2 percent. A draft version of the report was provided to The New York Times by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear watchdog group that has long been critical of the commission’s risk assessments and obtained it through a Freedom of Information Act request. Since the recent triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, such groups have been arguing that the commission urgently needs to tighten safeguards for new and aging plants in the United States. The report is a synthesis of 20 years of computer studies and engineering analyses, stated in complex mathematical terms. In essence, it states that if a prolonged loss of electric power caused a typical American reactor core to melt down, the great bulk of the radioactive material released would remain inside the building even when the reactor’s containment shell was breached. Big releases of radioactive material would not be immediate, and people within a 10-mile radius would have enough time to evacuate, the study found. The chance of a death from acute radiation exposure within 10 miles is therefore near zero, the study projects, although some people would receive doses high enough to cause fatal cancers in decades to come. One person in every 4,348 living within 10 miles would be expected to develop a “latent cancer” as a result of radiation exposure, compared with one in 167 in previous estimates. “Accidents progress more slowly, in some cases much more slowly, than previously assumed,” Charles G. Tinkler, a senior adviser for research on severe accidents and one of the study’s authors, said in an interview at a commission office building here. “Releases are smaller, and in some cases much smaller, of certain key radioactive materials.” The N.R.C. did not intend to release the report until next spring and said its conclusions were still being adjusted after a peer review. The health effects of a catastrophic meltdown were hypothetical until the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island. That destroyed a billion- dollar reactor but caused no apparent physical harm to nearby residents, immediately or over time. Debate has persisted over whether the United States skirted a disaster or whether that accident was about as bad as it could get. Edwin Lyman, a nuclear physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, contends that the nuclear commission has consistently painted an overly rosy picture and that its latest study does as well. He noted that the study assumed a successful evacuation of 99.5 percent of the people within 10 miles, for example. The report also assumes “average” weather conditions, he noted. But if a rainstorm were under way during a release of radioactive materials, he said, it could wash contaminants out of the air into a small area, producing a high dose there. Jennifer L. Uhle, the deputy director of the commission’s office of nuclear regulatory research, said the report was intended to present the “best estimate” and not the worst case. Dr. Lyman said the earlier estimate was of a different accident, a major pipe break. The new study considered that accident too unlikely to analyze. Dr. Lyman suggested that in projections of fatal cancer cases, the focus should be on people who live
Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Fwd: A video from Greece, Europe
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Thanks for sending this powerful and beautiful and HOPEFUL video. --Bonnie Weinstein Socialist Viewpoint Magazine socialistviewpoint.org On Jul 29, 2011, at 7:10 PM, michael a. lebowitz wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == from a friend: This is a short video we have produced on the recent events in Greece (and the EU). I also sent it to the OPE-List. Please feel free to didtribute it further. We are rather optimistic about the possibility of huge mass mobilizations after summer vacations. I wish you a nice summer, Coming soon... in a square near you! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE3R1BQrYCw&feature=player_embedded -- http://users.ntua.gr/jmilios/ -- - Michael A. Lebowitz Professor Emeritus Economics Department Simon Fraser University University Drive Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6 Home: Phone 604-689-9510 Cell: 778-230-6137 Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/ options/marxism/giobon%40comcast.net Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Japanese government killing its own people in Fukushima
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Japanese government killing its own people in Fukushima http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVuGwc9dlhQ&feature=player_embedded The video above documents a meeting between Fukushima residents and government officials from Tokyo, said to have taken place on 19 July 2011. The citizens are demanding their government evacuate people from a broader area around the Fukushima nuclear plant, because of ever-increasing fears about the still-spreading radiation. They are demanding that their government provide financial and logistical support to get out. In the video above, you can see that some participants actually brought samples of their children’s urine to the meeting, and they demanded that the government test it for radioactivity. When asked by one person at the meeting about citizens’ right to live a healthy and radioactive-free life, Local Nuclear Emergency Response Team Director Akira Satoh replies “I don’t know if they have that right.” Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Barbarous Confinement
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Barbarous Confinement By COLIN DAYAN July 17, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/opinion/18dayan.html?hp Nashville MORE than 1,700 prisoners in California, many of whom are in maximum isolation units, have gone on a hunger strike. The protest began with inmates in the Security Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison. How they have managed to communicate with each other is anyone’s guess — but their protest is everyone’s concern. Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations. Their isolation, which can last for decades, is often not explicitly disciplinary, and therefore not subject to court oversight. Their treatment is simply a matter of administrative convenience. Solitary confinement has been transmuted from an occasional tool of discipline into a widespread form of preventive detention. The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.” Since it is not defined as punishment for a crime, it does not fall under “cruel and unusual punishment,” the reasoning goes. As early as 1995, a federal judge, Thelton E. Henderson, conceded that so-called “supermax” confinement “may well hover on the edge of what is humanly tolerable,” though he ruled that it remained acceptable for most inmates. But a psychiatrist and Harvard professor, Stuart Grassian, had found that the environment was “strikingly toxic,” resulting in hallucinations, paranoia and delusions. In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty. Officials at Pelican Bay, in Northern California, claim that those incarcerated in the Security Housing Unit are “the worst of the worst.” Yet often it is the most vulnerable, especially the mentally ill, not the most violent, who end up in indefinite isolation. Placement is haphazard and arbitrary; it focuses on those perceived as troublemakers or simply disliked by correctional officers and, most of all, alleged gang members. Often, the decisions are not based on evidence. And before the inmates are released from the barbarity of 22-hour-a-day isolation into normal prison conditions (themselves shameful) they are often expected to “debrief,” or spill the beans on other gang members. The moral queasiness that we must feel about this method of extracting information from those in our clutches has all but disappeared these days, thanks to the national shame of “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantánamo. Those in isolation can get out by naming names, but if they do so they will likely be killed when returned to a normal facility. To “debrief” is to be targeted for death by gang members, so the prisoners are moved to “protective custody” — that is, another form of solitary confinement. Hunger strikes are the only weapon these prisoners have left. Legal avenues are closed. Communication with the outside world, even with family members, is so restricted as to be meaningless. Possessions — paper and pencil, reading matter, photos of family members, even hand- drawn pictures — are removed. (They could contain coded messages between gang members, we are told, or their loss may persuade the inmates to snitch when every other deprivation has failed.) The poverty of our criminological theorizing is reflected in the official response to the hunger strike. Now refusing to eat is regarded as a threat, too. Authorities are considering force-feeding. It is likely it will be carried out — as it has been, and possibly still continues to be — at Guantánamo (in possible violation of international law) and in an evil caricature of medical care. In the summer of 1996, I visited two “special management units” at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. A warden boasted that one of the units was the model for Pelican Bay. He led me down the corridors on impeccably clean floors. There was no paint on the concrete walls. Although the corridors had skylights, the cells had no windows. Nothing inside could be moved or removed. The cells contained only a poured concrete bed, a stainless steel mirror, a sink and a toilet. Inmates had no human contact, except when handcuffed or chained to leave their cells or during the often brutal cell extractions. A small place for exercise, called the “dog pen,” with cement floors and walls, so high they could see nothing but the sky, provided the only access to fresh air. Later, an inmate wrote to me, con
Re: [Marxism] Invitation to Listserve Discussing How to Transform Society
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Go ahead and add me. Bonnie Weinstein On Jul 6, 2011, at 3:16 PM, John A Imani wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Comrades, Would like to have your input on how it is that capitalism has failed. More importantly it is high time that we discussed how it is that we might do things differently. That is, what would our new society look like. During a discussion on "The Economic Workings of a New Society", held at the Los Angeles Anarchist Bookfair on June 25, 2011, it was proposed that a listserve dedicated to a discussion of thoughts, ideas and descriptions as to how a more humane society might look as compared to the brutalities of capitalism. The list will be un-moderated for members, this means that your messages will not be subjected to subjective opinion as to whether it is valid or not. This means that you will be able to submit full documents to be posted on the listserve. This means that prior writings of other authors that you admire may be posted. Only the list of the subscribers will be held confidential. Cases of spam sent to the listserve will result in 1 warning (as we all, I think, have been 'high-jacked'). The 2nd case will result in de- listing. The de-listing can be appealed to the list. Should there be any proposed additions to this description, they can be forwarded to the listserve and added should no objections occur. If so then this as all questions can be discussed. If you'd like to join, respond to this e-mail and I will add you. JAI RAC-LA https://lists.riseup.net/www/admin/newplanet-newlives Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/ options/marxism/giobon%40comcast.net Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Democratic Action by Working People Critical in Today’s Environmental Crisis
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Democratic Action by Working People Critical in Today’s Environmental Crisis By Bonnie Weinstein July/August 2011 Socialist Viewpoint Vol. 11, No. 4 http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/ The Earth’s environment is reeling from catastrophic forms of energy extraction and use, not only from nuclear power plants, but from coal extraction by mountain-top removal1, which not only poisons the land and ground water, but demolishes pristine mountains. And by gas extraction from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which produces the powerful greenhouse gas, methane, and also dumps toxins used in the process into the environment2. This does not even take into account the weapons of mass destruction the U.S. is producing and unleashing across the globe. Nor does it take into account the massive pollution due to the dependence on fossil fuels by the transportation and all other forms of for-profit industries. The future of humanity and the planet Earth, at this point in time, is dubious, at best. We are in a crisis of monumental proportions, across all borders, across all industry and across all social and political aspects of human interaction. Our only hope for survival, as a species, will depend upon a massive worldwide effort by the majority—by working people, scientists and engineers—to reverse the damages already caused, and to prevent new, and worse catastrophes from occurring. The only way to achieve this is to take control of energy production and industry away from those who put private profit before everything else. Current nuclear crisis At Fukushima, TEPCO, the energy company that runs the nuclear power plant, announced that they had a “melt through.3” (A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor. A melt through means the fuel has melted through some layers of the containment vessel which could ultimately lead to a “China Syndrome,” a worse case scenario, which occurs when molten reactor core components completely penetrate the containment vessel and building, causing direct contamination of the environment.) If this isn’t bad enough for Japan, their fast-breeder reactor prototype plant, the Monju, has been in a state of shutdown because a 3.3-ton device crashed into the reactor’s inner vessel cutting off access to the plutonium and uranium fuel rods at its core. The recovery of the device is dangerous because the plant uses large quantities of liquid sodium to cool the nuclear fuel, which is highly flammable.4 And if you think we in the U.S. are immune to the nuclear crisis, think again. Right now, outside of Omaha, Nebraska, the Fort Calhoun reactor is surrounded by floodwaters.5 The problem there is that the river is expected to rise as much as five to seven feet above flood stage and the river has already risen 1.5 feet higher than Fort Calhoun’s 1,004-foot elevation above sea level. And due to the extraordinary amount of snow accumulation, they expect the floodwaters to continue to rise until the middle of August! The only thing protecting the plant is an 8-foot rubber wall outside the reactor building. And there’s a second Nebraska nuclear plant, the Cooper Power Station, which is also under threat by floodwaters.6 Cleanup know-how for nuclear vs. fossil fuels The crisis surrounding nuclear energy and weapons production will take a special effort since safe clean-up techniques have yet to be developed. Think of the dangers and complications of just moving nuclear material from one place to another. What kind of vehicle do you transport it in? And which communities will these vehicles travel through? Obviously these are decisions that involve and effect masses of people. They are the ones who have a right to a say in these decisions since it’s their lives that that are threatened by them. Pollution due to nuclear energy and weapons transportation and clean- up differs from pollution as a result of fossil fuel production. For the latter, we do have the technological and scientific knowledge to transport the material safely and to clean up the resulting pollution, albeit it’s a drain on profits to do so safely. If the fossil fuel industry were nationalized and put under the democratic control of workers, technicians and scientists, with complete access to corporate profits—i.e., workers’ control over all corporate profits—cleanup and safety measures could immediately begin to be implemented. Capitalism fouls everything up In each of these ongoing environmental catastrophes-in-the-making, the quest for ever-higher profits has been responsible for shortcuts, cover-ups and repeated safety violations. If nothing is done to take the profit out of
[Marxism] Polluting Afghanistan with Nuclear Material
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Is Karzai's Accusation That Coalition Forces Are Polluting Afghanistan with Nuclear Material Accurate or an Over-Reaction? Afghan President Hamid Karzai's recent comment that U.S. and NATO-led forces use weapons with "nuclear components" may be a reference to depleted-uranium munitions, whose health impact is still being studied By Larry Greenemeier | Saturday, June 25, 2011 | 14 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=afghanistan-karzai- us-depleted-uranium&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20110629 President Obama has called for the withdrawal of 33,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the next year and the remaining 68,000 by the end of 2014, but questions linger regarding what the troops are leaving behind after more than nine years of combat. In particular, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has accused U.S. and NATO-led coalition troops of littering his country with weapons that use "nuclear components." Karzai made this comment last week during an address to the Afghanistan Youth International Conference, throughout which he broadly criticized coalition forces and pointed out that the U.S. has been in negotiations with the Taliban in an attempt to end the fighting set off by the September 11, 2001 , terrorist attacks. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates , during an appearance June 19 on CNN's State of the Union news program, confirmed such negotiations had taken place. Less clear, however, are exactly which weapons Karzai was referencing and their long-term impact on the Afghani people and their country. Karzai's comments likely refer to ammunition that uses depleted uranium (DU) to pierce armor or, conversely, to strengthen armored vehicles, according to scientists as well as intelligence and policy analysts. They also note that DU is not "nuclear" in the sense that brief exposure to it would not cause radiation sickness or cancer in the way that fallout from a nuclear warhead or meltdown would. DU, the main by-product of uranium enrichment, is a chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal that is "mildly radioactive," with about 60 percent of the activity of natural uranium, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). "In short, DU munitions are not even remotely on the same scale of danger as having a war in the first place," says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and publisher of the ArmsControlWonk blog, which addresses disarmament, arms control and nonproliferation. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), a Unified Combatant Command unit of the U.S. armed forces whose territory includes the Middle East, claims that no DU weapons are currently being used in Afghanistan, although a spokesman acknowledges that "DU-type munitions were used in Iraq in anti-tank and anti-armor weapons." The U.S. military itself has reported on its use of Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II jet fighter aircraft in Afghanistan. Whereas the A-10's standard 30-millimeter rounds normally contain DU, CENTCOM says that the A-10s in use in Afghanistan are not using DU munitions. Why use DU? "Wherever we send our A-10s, soon enough we hear reports of uranium contamination thanks to depleted uranium," says Chris Bronk, an information technology policy research fellow at Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and a former U.S. State Department diplomat. Still, it is unclear how much DU ammunition has actually been used in Karzai's country (either by the U.S. or its NATO allies) and the long-term impact of DU on the environment, he adds. DU kinetic-energy rounds are an effective way of penetrating armored vehicles. "You want something dense, and DU is denser than lead, something on the order of 1.6 times the density of lead," says Kristian Gustafson, deputy director of the Brunel Center for Intelligence and Security Studies (BCISS) at West London's Brunel University. "You've now upped your energy transfer by significant quantity." Still, U.S. and NATO air-strike targets in Afghanistan are more likely to be mud–brick buildings than armored vehicles, and DU rounds "are useless for anything other than smashing armor," he adds. DU is used in anti-tank shells because it is a heavy metal that can slam through shielding plates on armored vehicles, agrees Hans Kristensen, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project. How dangerous is DU? The DU used in munitions is neither the same as natural uranium ore nor the radioactive uranium used in a nuclear reactor. DU is mostly composed of the isotope uranium 238 (U238); its more
[Marxism] Blacks are "looting" and whites are "finding food" in New Orleans in 2005
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == http://www.o-dub.com/images/looter.jpg Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Distrust of Government Impedes Reform in Greece
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Distrust of Government Impedes Reform in Greece By RACHEL DONADIO June 25, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/world/europe/26greece.html?ref=world ATHENS — Demonstrators projected the word across the facade of Parliament last week, and it underscored the hurdle that Prime Minister George Papandreou faces in selling an increasingly resentful electorate on a tough new round of austerity measures: “Thieves.” Most Greeks say they have little confidence in a political class that they see as corrupt and unaccountable. A recent study by Transparency International in Greece found that 9 out of 10 Greeks believed that their politicians were corrupt, and 80 percent said that Parliament had lost credibility. “We’re here because we have lost confidence in the present political system, which has brought us to the edge,” Christos Siveris, 35, said last week as he waved a Greek flag outside Parliament during a crucial confidence vote, which Mr. Papandreou won. “This is our Thermopylae,” he added, referring to the ancient battle in which an outnumbered army of Greek warriors held out against a Persian force before ultimately succumbing. This week Mr. Papandreou will seek parliamentary approval for an austerity package that was agreed on Thursday with European officials and the International Monetary Fund. He is expected to succeed, despite tensions within his Socialist Party and in the face of intransigence from the center-right opposition, which was in power when Greece’s debt soared. But as the crisis extends into a second year, a growing number of Greeks are turning a critical eye on their own government. They are questioning why members of Parliament have immunity from prosecution unless Parliament votes to lift it, and they want to see more transparency and accountability in party financing. And having faced across-the-board wage and pension cuts, they have come to question why the lawmakers have benefits that include state cars, generous double pensions (from the government and their own professional guilds), bonuses for attending committee meetings on top of their $8,500-a-month salaries, and personal staff who are widely perceived to attend to a tradition of providing favors in exchange for votes. In recent years, a number of former officials from both the conservative New Democracy and the Socialist Parties have been implicated in a range of corruption scandals. In one episode, which occurred when New Democracy was in power, the government approved a highly complex land swap in which a Greek Orthodox monastery on Mount Athos received prime, state-owned real estate in exchange for much less valuable land in a rural area. But to date, no officials have been charged with wrongdoing. Such scandals “add to the frustration and the popular perception that they’re crooks,” said Costas Bakouris, the president of Transparency International’s Greek branch. Aggravating that perception, the legislators have immunity from prosecution unless the full Parliament votes to lift it, something that has happened only 17 times out of the hundreds of requests since democracy was restored in 1974 after a military dictatorship. Even after they leave office, former lawmakers can be prosecuted only during the parliamentary session in which they are accused of breaking the law and the subsequent session. In addition to the austerity votes, Parliament is expected to vote this week on whether to broaden an investigation into Akis Tsochatzopoulos, a former defense minister from the Socialist Party who is accused of corruption in the Greek Navy’s procurement of German submarines. Greece’s Skai television and the related Kathimerini newspaper reported that Mr. Tsochatzopoulos had been living in one of Athens’s most exclusive areas in an apartment purchased from an offshore company. To many here, the case has come to represent everything they consider wrong about the political system, not least because as a former government minister, Mr. Tsochatzopoulos is immune from prosecution. He denies wrongdoing. In a rare move and an acknowledgment of public sentiment, the two main parties have proposed that his immunity be lifted so that he can be prosecuted. In another high-profile case, a former Socialist Party transport minister was charged with money-laundering this year after he admitted that he received several hundred thousand dollars from a Greek subsidiary of Siemens. This month, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a lawmaker from the New Democracy Party and the son of a former prime minister, caused a stir when he proposed reducing Parliament to 200 members from 300; eliminating double pensions, s
Re: [Marxism] Queen of the Sun: What are the bees are telling us?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Hi Louis, I would like permission to run your review of the documentary, "Queen of the Sun: What are the bees telling us" as part of our environmental discussion in the upcoming July/August Socialist Viewpoint. I want to include contributions on the different ways our environment is collapsing. I will give full credit, of course, to you and your website, as well as the links to the official movie site and the YouTube trailer. I'm looking forward to seeing the movie. In solidarity, Bonnie Weinstein P.S., Have you seen this?: Cuba: The Accidental Eden http://video.pbs.org/video/1598230084/ [This is a stunningly beautiful portrait of the Cuban natural environment as it is today. However, several times throughout, the narrator tends to imply that if it werent for the U.S. embargo against Cuba, Cuba's natural environmet would be destroyed by the influx of tourism, ergo, the embargo is saving nature. But the Cuban scientists and naturalists tell a slightly different story. But I don't want to spoil the delightfully surprising ending. It's a beautiful film of a beautiful country full of beautiful, articulate and well-educated peoplebw] On Jun 10, 2011, at 11:42 AM, Louis Proyect wrote: == Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Whoever looks at a beehive should actually say with an exalted frame of mind, “Making this detour by way of the beehive, the entire cosmos can find its way into human beings and help to make them sound in mind and body.” –Rudolf Steiner, from a lecture on honey bees Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that I had a beehive here inside my heart. And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures. –Opening lines of Antonio Machado’s Last Night as I was Sleeping Drawing upon the canary in the coal mine narrative, one might say that the honey bee serves the same purpose for humanity as a whole. Disappearing honey bees are an omen of our disappearance as well. But the honey bee is more than an early warning system or an alarm. This humble creature that has been on the planet for 150 million years is responsible for pollinating at least forty percent of the fruits and vegetables that are part of our diet. In 2007 the media was all abuzz (excuse the pun) over disappearing honey bees, something that was posited as a kind of mystery. After seeing the powerful documentary “Queen of the Sun: What the Bees are Telling Us?”, the only mystery will be why the mainstream media could not have uncovered the source of the looming disaster without delay. Its failure to do so reminds us of the need for alternative sources of information, starting with the experts and activists who are featured in this film directed by Taggart Siegel. Featured prominently in “Queen of the Sun”, beekeeper Gunter Hauk states that the crisis of the disappearing bee is “More important than global warming. We could call it Colony Collapse of the human being too.” full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/queen-of-the-sun- what-are-the-bees-telling-us/ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/ options/marxism/giobon%40comcast.net Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Twenty-five to Life, What Does it Mean to Me?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Twenty-five to Life, What Does it Mean to Me? By Herman Bell May/June 2011 Socialist Viewpoint http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_11/mayjun_11_43.html Herman Bell has been incarcerated for more than 30 years, sentenced to 25 years to life. Despite an exemplary prison record he is regularly turned down for parole because of “the seriousness of the crime” for which he was convicted: the killing of a policeman. A mentor to many of the younger brothers at Sullivan where Herman is incarcerated, he recently spoke at a “Lifers” event where he gave this presentation. The Prisoner Justice Network of New York State is fighting for the change of such inhuman parole regulations that keep thousands of sisters and brothers incarcerated for decades despite having served their terms and having excellent prison records. Although I have served more than 37 years in prison, I am still unable to wrap my mind around what that means; years of locking in- and-out of cells, letters from home and the occasional family photo; one letter telling that the new baby has arrived, another telling that my niece or nephew is doing well in school and that the neighbor next door died in his sleep; the photo shows Ma-dear and Dad looking good but are noticeably older. Twenty-five to life, what does that mean to me? If you were a family man, like I was, with a young wife and two rambunctious boys, the separation had to have been heart-wrenching. It was for me. My boys, Johnes and Keith, had thoroughly broken me into domesticity: feeding them, changing and washing their diapers, dressing them, consoling them, taking them for their shots. Hoping the family dog wouldn’t bite me for reprimanding them. Their mother, high-spirited and the love of my life, was no less challenging; a borderline red-bone, with a delightful spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks, almond-shaped eyes and pouty lips. During our feuds, rather than talk, we wrote notes to each other and the children handed them to us. What does doing twenty-five to life mean to me? As I mull over this question, I am reminded of the Elmina Castle, the Portuguese slave fortress, located on the West coast of Ghana from which enchained Afrikans were led through its infamous “door-of-no-return” to the holds of waiting slave ships that would take them to the New World. I too feel as though I’ve walked through a “door-of-no-return.” Imprisonment: a modern plantation If one knew nothing about the geography of a town in upstate New York where one is imprisoned, then one can readily imagine what the Afrikan slave must have felt on a southern plantation—not knowing where to run or how to get there. For me, getting from Attica or Clinton Dannemora, to my hood, seemed no different than for the Afrikan on a slave plantation in Georgia getting from there back to Afrika. Across the country, I have been held in many jails, and my family has had to travel thousands of miles to see me at considerable expense. You know how families are received at these places: standing in the elements to get in; suffering the indignities of disparaging remarks; seating arrangements; frustrating package rules. Prison is where spiteful, petty, contemptible, morally unkind acts find free expression at the whim of those who have authority over us. The keepers are vigilant and they instinctively ferret out unguarded self- esteem, courage, and strength. Prison is designed to break you down, not build you up. It casually destroys the weak and unwary (as though they were an afterthought), and turns the spiritually debased into beasts. What’s not so strange about this is that the spiritually debased elicits no particular attention from the keepers. Twenty-five to life, what does that mean to me? As the years go by Time, faces, and relationships change, and like sand cascading down the funnel of an hourglass, nothing can resist this change. One day, you look in the mirror and see gray hair and a face that tells you you’ve aged; your body tells you that too. Some of your old friends have moved on and new ones have come to take their place. Your mother and father may have passed away, as have mine, and I was unable to see them buried. You may have contemplated numerous possible scenarios, should you be imprisoned, but never that; and neither did I. The years take their toll, the people you believed in, the certainties you once embraced might have led you to realize that the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. With luck, we come to understand that humility and wisdom come with age and experience, and that death is often merciful. Release time and its uncertainty
[Marxism] Capitalism, Energy Production and the Environment
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Capitalism, Energy Production and the Environment An introduction to a Socialist Viewpoint discussion By Bonnie Weinstein http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_11/mayjun_11_01.html The earthquake and resultant tsunami that took out the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan on March 11, 2011, has inspired a new discussion among the environmental movement, including the socialist left. Not just about the safety of nuclear energy, but the safety of all energy production under capitalism. The capitalist mode of production-for-profit has always taken priority over the health and safety of people and the planet. The ruling class has shown time and again, and as you will see in the excerpts from the New York Times below, that safety is sacrificed for profit, even at nuclear power plants. As socialists, we do offer solutions to these problems and have contributions to make to this discussion. At the same time, we know that these problems will continue and multiply as long as the capitalist profit motive is allowed to persist. In this issue we present a selection of articles representing current trends of thought in this ongoing discussion of the nuclear and fossil fuel industries and their impact on the planet. We hope this discussion will shed some light on the “bottom line,” i.e., capitalism’s gotta go! Some background In a New York Times article dated April 26, 2011 by Norimitsu Onishi and Ken Belson titled, “Culture of Complicity Tied to Stricken Nuclear Plant:” “In 2000, Kei Sugaoka, a Japanese-American nuclear inspector who had done work for General Electric at Daiichi, told Japan’s main nuclear regulator about a cracked steam dryer that he believed was being concealed. If exposed, the revelations could have forced the operator, Tokyo Electric Power, to do what utilities least want to do: undertake costly repairs. ...Just as in any Japanese village, the like-minded—nuclear industry officials, bureaucrats, politicians and scientists—have prospered by rewarding one another with construction projects, lucrative positions, and political, financial and regulatory support. The few openly skeptical of nuclear power’s safety become village outcasts, losing out on promotions and backing.” And in another Times article dated May 7, 2011 by Tom Zeller Jr. titled, “Nuclear Agency Is Criticized as Too Close to Its Industry:” “In the fall of 2007, workers at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois were using a wire brush to clean a badly corroded steel pipe— one in a series that circulate cooling water to essential emergency equipment—when something unexpected happened: the brush poked through. “The resulting leak caused a 12-day shutdown of the two reactors for repairs. “The plant’s owner, the Exelon Corporation, had long known that corrosion was thinning most of these pipes. But rather than fix them, it repeatedly lowered the minimum thickness it deemed safe. By the time the pipe broke, Exelon had declared that pipe walls just three- hundredths of an inch thick—less than one-tenth the original minimum thickness—would be good enough. “Though no radioactive material was released, safety experts say that if enough pipes had ruptured during a reactor accident, the result could easily have been a nuclear catastrophe at a plant just 100 miles west of Chicago. “Exelon’s risky decisions occurred under the noses of on-site inspectors from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. No documented inspection of the pipes was made by anyone from the N.R.C. for at least the eight years preceding the leak, and the agency also failed to notice that Exelon kept lowering the acceptable standard, according to a subsequent investigation by the commission’s inspector general. “Exelon’s penalty? A reprimand for two low-level violations—a tepid response all too common at the N.R.C., said George A. Mulley Jr., a former investigator with the inspector general’s office who led the Byron inquiry.” Clearly, the safety of nuclear energy production under capitalism takes a back seat to the pursuit of profits. Nuclear, fossil and renewable energy While this discussion focuses primarily on nuclear energy, the safety of fossil fuel extraction—fracking1, mountaintop removal, traditional coal mining; oil drilling—especially deep water drilling—and their related energy production methods are also called into question. Also under discussion is whether or not alternative, renewable energy resources can produce the quantity of energy necessary for a modern, industrial society that includes supplying energy to all those who currently have no access to electricity or running water—let alone
[Marxism] Democracy or Tyranny?
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Democracy or Tyranny? By Bonnie Weinstein May/June 2011 Socialist Viewpoint http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/mayjun_11/mayjun_11_05.html We have included in this issue of Socialist Viewpoint many articles relating to the purported killing of Osama bin Laden and his assumed connection to the events of 9/11. We would like to qualify these articles and statements by pointing out that Obama and his bi-partisan administration has offered NO proof of any of these accusations and, in fact, has methodically destroyed the evidence. Certainly, raiding a compound supposedly occupied by bin Laden, summarily executing a man that was reported to be bin Laden, then dumping this person’s body into the ocean, is not proof that it was bin Laden—just the opposite—it makes it impossible to prove it was him. Murder by decree However, this murderous action taken by President Obama does serve a purpose. Not only to reaffirm all the fear and myths related to the War on Terror, but it is also meant to set a deadly precedent. The President of the United States can simply point a finger at someone, send assassins to kill that person, then destroy the evidence of who that person is by dumping the body in the ocean—with no questions asked or allowed. Make no mistake about it, this was designed to have a tremendous, chilling and terrifying impact on all working people—especially any who dare to speak out against the injustices at home and abroad carried out by this U.S. bi-partisan government and its minions. According to a May 21, 2011 article on Salon.com, by Justin Elliot titled, “Four more years! (Of the Patriot Act...),” a deal has been reached in Congress that will allow such actions—including killing U.S. citizens anywhere in the world by secret order of the President— to continue unabated and with impunity for the next four years. Obama declares Bradley Manning guilty! The Patriot Act also gives the President the authority to declare whistleblowers like Bradley Manning, the young Army private accused of leaking information on U.S. war crimes to the news service, WikiLeaks, guilty before he is even tried. On Thursday April 21, 2011 in San Francisco a group of Bradley Manning supporters protested the prosecution of Manning at a Barack Obama fundraising event. One of Manning’s supporters was able to question the President directly afterwards. During that conversation, Obama said—and it was recorded on videotape—that Manning was guilty.1 Obviously, these comments by the President of the United States are extremely prejudicial to Manning’s case and, in fact, are grounds to free Bradley Manning now! Instead, Manning still faces the death penalty and has yet to have his day in court after almost a year in jail—most of that time spent in severe isolation and humiliation! Kill the messenger The President is still in a frenzy to try to criminalize Julian Assange of WikiLeaks for leaking the proof of U.S. war crimes to the press without having to also criminalize all the other press and mass- media outlets. They have all publicized the “secret” war crimes documents exposing the many corrupt actions by the U.S. government, its military and contractors. All were leaked by the same news service —Julian Assange’s WiliLeaks. The fear of death The bin Laden death fiasco makes Obama’s message clear. Any attempt to expose the treachery of the U.S. bi-partisan government of, by and for the wealthy, will be met with the utmost brutality, violence and torture—including illegal and indefinite incarceration. To hell with the right to habeas corpus; or “Innocent until proven guilty;” or the right to confront your accuser; or the right to free speech; or to protest war and social injustice; or to fight for better pay or working conditions—without being threatened with government FBI, CIA and police repression—including the specter of outright assassination by secret order of the President! These are not the ways of democracy; they are the ways of tyranny! The “biggest purveyors of violence in the world”—the U.S. bi-partisan government and its allies—are in charge and have shown they will use any means necessary to keep their dominion over all! They will continue to get away with it and worse, unless and until we stand together in our huge majority, and disarm and de-throne them. Only then can we begin to make rational and democratically-derived decisions based on our common interests and for the benefit and wellbeing of all life on the planet. Democracy has nothing to do with voting for one wealthy tyrant over another. Democracy is the freedom of the majority to discuss, democratically decide and
[Marxism] Rough Homecoming for a Washington Lawmaker
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Rough Homecoming for a Washington Lawmaker “What did I take away from this meeting?” he said. “We need to tax the millionaires and billionaires, and that’s the magical formula.” By ASHLEY PARKER April 28, 2011, 10:17 am http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/rough-homecoming-for-a- washington-lawmaker/ Audience members yelled at one another to stop yelling. The moderator talked over Representative Michael G. Grimm to ask the crowd to please stop talking over him. And Mr. Grimm, a Republican from New York, was alternately cordial and combative on Wednesday night as he hosted the first town-hall- style forum of his term, a freewheeling and rowdy meeting that often felt more like wrestling than local politics. Mr. Grimm stood at the front of a Brooklyn school auditorium filled with about 100 people and started off optimistically, asking for a show of hands from all who believed they were better off now than their parents were. “That’s the vast majority, I’d say,” Mr. Grimm said, scanning the raised arms inside William McKinley Junior High School. “I don’t,” a middle-aged man called out. “Well, in this room, that’s how many hands went up,” Mr. Grimm said. “Are we going to debate that, how many hands went up? That’s a little silly.” But debate they did, everything from why the wealthy might pay less in taxes than the audience felt was fair (“The Cayman Islands!”) to overhauling health care (“Single payer!”). Many in the auditorium had come to Mr. Grimm’s event to express their displeasure with his support for the budget proposal by Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin. Some believe the plan would do away with Medicare while cutting taxes for wealthy Americans and corporations. “We can’t dismantle Medicare!” a woman in the front called out. “Everybody gets old; everybody gets sick!” “The deficit is due to the Bush-era tax cuts,” someone else said. “The whole deficit is due to the Bush-era tax cuts?” Mr. Grimm asked. “A good part, a good part,” came the resounding reply. Former President George W. Bush was one of the evening’s frequent scapegoats, prompting Mr. Grimm, at one point, to say: “This year’s deficit is due to George Bush? That’s insanity! That’s insane.” Later, he turned to the reporters in the room, as if looking for support. “I want the press to document this,” he said. “The reason that the Democratic House, the Democratic Senate and the president, who’s a Democrat, and his name was President Barack Obama, not President George Bush, they didn’t pass a budget or pass any plan to stop our debt crisis because of George Bush? It was because of George Bush?” At times, it seemed as if Mr. Grimm was leading his angry and murmuring constituents in a call-and-answer refrain, as they shouted out comments and answers to questions he had not yet posed. The crowd had come equipped with facts and figures, and it hurled them with abandon. “We watch C-Span,” said Peggy Devane, 68, who lives in Mr. Grimm’s district in Bay Ridge. “We know what goes on in Congress.” Rosalie Caliendo, 64, read from her notebook for a moment, concluding, “We know what happened when Herbert Hoover was president.” Mr. Grimm was alternatively respectful, listening to audience members who were angry with him, and confrontational, inviting the crowd to jeer. “I’ll say it again — I supported that budget,” Mr. Grimm said, referring to Mr. Ryan’s plan. “You don’t have to yell out.” As the crowd erupted into a loud chorus of boos, he continued: “Get it all out, get it all out. It’s good to get it out. Get it out of your system.” Another time, when Ms. Devane continued to heckle him and shout out comments when others were trying to speak, Mr. Grimm came to the edge of her row. “We know you disagree,” he said, growing increasingly loud. “You saying it 10 times isn’t going to change my mind. I get it. I respect it. I think you’re wrong.” When Ms. Devane said Mr. Grimm was supposed to be representing her, he added: “You wouldn’t vote for me, and I know that. I respect that. So don’t pretend you voted for me. You didn’t.” Finally, Mr. Grimm and Ms. Devane laughed and shook hands, and the congressman turned to the crowd. “How many people in here did vote for me?” he asked. Mr. Grimm was met with a roar of applause and whistles, and the girl who had sung the national anthem offered, “I can’t vote yet, but I would’ve.” Eventually, Mr. Grimm tried to bring the event to a close. “What did I take away from this meeting?” he said. “We need to tax the millionaires and billionaires, and that’s the magical formula.” Mr. Grimm struggled to be heard over the din as half the audience
[Marxism] Massachusetts House Seeks to Limit Collective Bargaining
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Massachusetts House Seeks to Limit Collective Bargaining "'Everybody’s pretty upset,' said Robert J. Haynes, president of the Massachusetts A.F.L.-C.I.O. 'It’s hard for me to understand how my good friends in the Massachusetts House, that have told me they support collective bargaining, could do this.' ...On Friday, Mr. Patrick said through a spokesman that labor must have 'a meaningful role' in determining how to control health care costs, though he did not elaborate. The House voted 111-42 in favor of the plan, with 81 Democrats approving it." By ABBY GOODNOUGH April 29, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/30/business/economy/ 30massachusetts.html?src=busln BOSTON — Union leaders in this traditionally labor-friendly state are fuming over a plan passed by the Massachusetts House of Representatives this week to curtail bargaining rights for municipal workers, a highly unusual move by Democratic lawmakers. The bill, passed late Tuesday night in advance of planned labor protests, would let local officials unilaterally set health insurance co-payments and deductibles for their employees after a monthlong discussion period with unions. Leaders of the House said it would save cities and towns $100 million in the budget year that starts in July. While Republican-controlled legislatures in Wisconsin and Ohio this year have weakened the ability of public-sector unions to bargain collectively, and Republicans in other states have pushed for a variety of curbs on unions, Massachusetts is the first state where a Democratic-led chamber has voted to limit bargaining rights. “Everybody’s pretty upset,” said Robert J. Haynes, president of the Massachusetts A.F.L.-C.I.O. “It’s hard for me to understand how my good friends in the Massachusetts House, that have told me they support collective bargaining, could do this.” But the bill faces uncertain prospects in the Senate, which is also controlled by Democrats. Senate President Therese Murray said Wednesday that she was pleased the House had “moved the needle” on the contentious issue of health care costs, but she has not endorsed the plan. Dave Falcone, a Senate spokesman, said Friday that Ms. Murray “has been consistent in her message that something has to be done, that there has to be savings, and that everyone should have a seat at the table.” While Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, has not pledged to sign the bill if it reaches his desk, he proposed a similar plan early this year and praised the House this week for its “important” vote. He also raised concerns about a provision of the House plan allowing towns and cities to opt out of it and said unions must not have veto power over municipal health plans. On Friday, Mr. Patrick said through a spokesman that labor must have “a meaningful role” in determining how to control health care costs, though he did not elaborate. The House voted 111-42 in favor of the plan, with 81 Democrats approving it. Representative Brian Dempsey, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said he supported it — and in fact helped create it — after seeing no other way of avoiding disastrous cuts to local public safety and education budgets. The legislature had urged municipalities and their unions to curb rising health costs for several years, he said, but with no success. “We have to get a handle on this,” he said. “The fact of the matter is costs are going up and the money is not going to the areas we desperately need it to.” He acknowledged, though, that it was “certainly difficult” to hear labor’s angry response. Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a nonpartisan watchdog group that supported the plan, said the health care costs for cities and towns had been growing by about 11 percent a year and “cannibalizing” local budgets. “Yes, it’s a small curtailment of their collective bargaining powers,” Mr. Widmer said of municipal unions, “but with the corollary that it will save lots of their members’ jobs.” Under the House plan, co-payments and deductibles for municipal workers would have to be at least equal to those of state employees. And unions would retain the right to negotiate what portion of premiums their members paid. Mr. Patrick and House leaders have sought to head off comparisons with the legislation that Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin signed earlier this year, saying the Massachusetts plan does not go nearly as far. That did not stop the Republican Party of Wisconsin from proclaiming Mr. Patrick “an ally” on Friday and congratulating him on the bill. Mr. Patrick is to speak at a Democratic Party dinner in Wisconsin
[Marxism] "Bradley Manning Exception to the Bill of Rights"
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == The "Bradley Manning Exception to the Bill of Rights" Devastates the Credibility of the Military Justice System By Kevin Zeese President Obama Makes a Fair Trial of Bradley Manning Impossible By Declaring Him Guilty April 25, 2011 http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Bradley-Manning-Excep-by-Kevin- Zeese-110425-129.html ["He broke the law!" says Obama about Bradley Manning who has yet to even be charged, let alone, gone to trial and found guilty. How horrendous is it for the President to declare someone guilty before going to trial or being charged with a crime! Justice in the U.S.A.! ...BW] Obama on FREE BRADLEY MANNING protest... San Francisco, CA. April 21, 2011-Presidential remarks on interrupt/interaction/performance art happening at fundraiser. Logan Price queries Barack after org. FRESH JUICE PARTY political action. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfmtUpd4id0&feature=youtu.be The credibility of the military justice system is being undermined by the prosecution of Bradley Manning. His abusive punishment without trial violates his due process rights; his harsh treatment in solitary confinement-torture conditions violates the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment; and now the commander-in-chief has announced his guilt before trial making a fair trial impossible. A Bradley Manning exception to the Bill of Rights is developing as the Obama administration seeks Manning's punished no matter what constitutional protections they violate. On Thursday April 21, 2011 in San Francisco a group of Bradley Manning supporters protested the prosecution of Manning at a Barack Obama fundraising event. One of Manning's supporters was able to question the president directly afterwards and during the conversation, Obama said on videotape that Manning was guilty. Can you imagine if the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamene'i, pronounced an Iranian military whistle blower "guilty" before any trial was held? Khamene'i is the commander-in-chief of all armed forces in Iran, just as President Obama is the commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed services. Would anyone in the United States think that a trial before Iranian military officers that followed such a pronouncement could be fair? The U.S. government would use the situation to make propaganda points about the phony justice system in Iran. President Obama's pronouncement about Manning, "He broke the law," amounts to unlawful command influence -- something prohibited in military trials because it is devastating to the military justice system. Manning will be judged by a jury of military officers in a military court where everyone involved follows the orders of the commander-in-chief. How are these officers going to rule against their commander-in-chief, especially after Manning has been tortured in solitary confinement for almost a year? Any officer who finds Manning "not guilty" will have no chance of advancing his career after doing so. Article 37 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice makes undo command influence unlawful . Unlawful Command Influence has been called "the carcinoma of the military justice system " and is often described as " the mortal enemy of military justice ." The importance of the command structure in the military makes command influence a threat to fair trails, i.e. " because the inherent power and influence of command are necessary and omnipresent facets of military life, everyone involved in both unit command and in military justice must exercise constant vigilance to protect against command influence becoming unlawful." Accordingly , "Unlawful Command Influence occurs when senior personnel, wittingly or unwittingly, have acted to influence court members, witnesses, or others participating in military justice cases. Such unlawful influence not only jeopardizes the validity of the judicial process, it undermines the morale of military members, their respect for the chain of command, and public confidence in the military." Further, even : "The "appearance of unlawful command influence is as devastating to the military justice system as the actual manipulation of any given trial.'" The commander-in-chief announcing guilt before trial is an unprecedented case of unlawful command influence. When unlawful command influence occurs a heavy burden is put on the prosecution to "prove beyond a reasonable doubt that: (1) the facts upon which the unlawful command influence is based are untrue; (2) those facts do not constitute unlawful command influence; or (3) the unlawful command influence will not affect the proceedings." Since President Obama is on videotape announcing the fi
[Marxism] Cuba: The Accidental Eden
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Cuba: The Accidental Eden http://video.pbs.org/video/1598230084/ [This is a stunningly beautiful portrait of the Cuban natural environment as it is today. However, several times throughout, the narrator tends to imply that if it werent for the U.S. embargo against Cuba, Cuba's natural environmet would be destroyed by the influx of tourism, ergo, the embargo is saving nature. But the Cuban scientists and naturalists tell a slightly different story. But I don't want to spoil the delightfully surprising ending. It's a beautiful film of a beautiful country full of humble, beautiful, articulate and well-educated peopleBonnie Weinstein] Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Musings in a Time of Global Imperial War By Lynne Stewart
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Musings in a Time of Global Imperial War By Lynne Stewart, presented to April 9th and 10th antiwar demonstrations in N.Y. and San Francisco When April, the cruelest month comes upon us, We as a movement turn our focus from "local" struggles to the Imperialism we cannot escape and increasingly, no nation on earth is exempt from. Back in the '60's when I was a young struggler, our Vietnam anti war demonstrations were exhilarating, they lifted us--We knew we were supporting the winning side in peoples' liberation and we could not lose. Today, things are murky. The enemy is more difficult to rally against. It is muddled. Attention should be paid to the fact that the US, the world's greatest arms dealer, has supplied both sides of the conflicts in Libya, Bahrain. So any death there or elsewhere in the Middle East is stamped "Made in the USA". Win/Win for the profiteers. Nevertheless the babies are still dying--as they died in Iraq (collateral damage said Madeline); and now as victims of KILL teams and drones inAfghanistan. As they die in Japan -- a result of natural disaster? yes but also the misguided capitalism that addicts the world at the behest of the almighty dollar. But, Struggle and rally we must. Lift our voice against the outrage. Force Attention to be paid. For over 40 years I have raised my voice, and put my body front and center. Now I raise it from behind the walls where more and more good people who have said NO to government are paying for their audacity. More must join us. We must prevail. Poem received from a Canadian Supporter in Ottawa John Bart Gerald (ga...@nightslantern.ca) Now From a Distance when you see this time this grey day from the distance of history ask if some without pretence fought for freedom lived with decency by caring risked their portion of life matched against the business of death We Stand Against the Business of Death. End the Unjust Wars! You can write to Lynne Stewart at: Lynne Stewart #53504 - 054 Unit 2N Federal Medical Center, Carswell P.O. Box 27137 Fort Worth, TEXAS 76127 Contributions can be made to: Lynne Stewart Defense Committee 1070 Dean Street Brooklyn, New York 11216 For further information: 718-789-0558 or 917-853-9759 Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Jena Six Activist Convicted, Faces Decades in Prison
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == *-*-*-*-*-*-* *-*-*-*-*-*-* Jena Six Activist Convicted, Faces Decades in Prison by Jordan Flaherty March 31, 2011 http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/flaherty010411.html Civil rights activist Catrina Wallace, who received national acclaim for her central role in organizing protests around the Jena Six case, was convicted today of three counts of distribution of a controlled substance. She was taken from the courtroom straight to jail after the verdict was read, and given a one million dollar bail. Her sentencing is expected to come next month. Wallace, who is 30, became an activist after her teenage brother, Robert Bailey, was arrested and charged with attempted murder after a fight in Jena High School. Bailey and five others later became known as the Jena Six, and their cause became a civil rights rallying cry that was called the first struggle of a 21st-century Civil Rights Movement. Their case eventually brought 50,000 people on a march through the town of Jena, and as a result of the public pressure the young men were eventually freed. The six are all now in college or -- in the case of the youngest -- on their way. Wallace and her mother, Caseptla Bailey, stayed in Jena and founded Organizing in the Trenches, a community organization dedicated to working with youth. Catrina Wallace was represented by Krystal Todd of the Lasalle Parish Public Defenders Office. The case was prosecuted by Lasalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters, who also prosecuted the Jena Six case, and famously told a room full of students: "I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen." The case was presided over by 28th District Judge J. Christopher Peters, a former Assistant District Attorney under Reed Walters. Peters is the son of Judge Jimmie C. Peters, who held the same seat until 1994. The 12-person jury had one Black member. Wallace was arrested as part of "Operation Third Option," which saw more than 150 officers, including a SWAT team and helicopters, storm into Jena's Black community on July 9, 2009. Although no drugs were seized, a dozen people were arrested, based on testimony and video evidence provided by a police informant, 23-year-old convicted drug dealer Evan Brown. So far, most of those arrested on that day have pled guilty and faced long sentences. Devin Lofton, who pled guilty to conspiracy to distribute, received ten years. Adrian Richardson, 34, who pled guilty to two counts of distribution, received twenty- five years. Termaine Lee, a twenty-two-year-old who had no previous record but faced six counts of distribution, received twenty years. In response to the verdict, community members responded with sadness and outrage. "We don't have any help here," said Marcus Jones, the father of Mychal Bell, another of the Jena Six youths. "Catrina tried to keep in high spirits leading up to the trial, but when a bomb like this is dropped on you, what can you do?" Jones and others are calling for the US Department of Justice to investigate. Wallace, a single mother, has three small children, aged 3, 5, and 10. The youngest child has frequent seizures. For more background on this case, see "Jena Sheriff Seeks Revenge for Civil Rights Protests." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-flaherty/jena-sheriff-seeks- reveng_b_575413.html Jordan Flaherty is a journalist and staffer with the Louisiana Justice Institute. He was the first writer to bring the story of the Jena Six to a national audience, and his award-winning reporting from the Gulf Coast has been featured in a range of outlets including the New York Times, Mother Jones, and Argentina's Clarin newspaper. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and Democracy Now, and appeared as a guest on CNN Morning, Anderson Cooper 360, and Keep Hope Alive with the Reverend Jesse Jackson. His new book is Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He can be reached at neworle...@leftturn.org, and more information about Floodlines can be found at floodlines.org. For speaking engagements, see communityandresistance.wordpress.com. *-*-*-*-*-*-* *-*-*-*-*-*-* Jena Sheriff Seeks Revenge for Civil Rights Protests Jordan Flaherty May 13, 2010 03:22 PM http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-flaherty/jena-sheriff-seeks- reveng_b_575413.html Sheriff Scott Franklin of Jena says he is trying to rid his community of drugs. Critics say he is pursuing a vendetta against the town's Black commun
[Marxism] Main Labor Mural Lawsuit and PA Miners Rally for Union Rights
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == *-*-*-*-*-*-* *-*-*-*-*-*-* Maine: Lawsuit Seeks to Restore Labor Mural By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS April 1, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/us/02brfs-LAWSUITSEEKS_BRF.html?ref=us A lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court on Friday over Gov. Paul LePage’s decision to remove a mural depicting the state’s labor history from the Labor Department’s building in Augusta. The lawsuit seeks to confirm the mural’s location, ensure that it is adequately preserved and restore it to the lobby of the Labor Department. It was filed on behalf of an organized labor representative, a workplace safety official, three artists and a lawyer. The governor contends that the mural depicting labor history overlooks the contributions of entrepreneurs. His press secretary, Adrienne Bennett, said the mural was “safe and secure, awaiting transfer to a suitable venue for public display.” *-*-*-*-*-*-* *-*-*-*-*-*-* Pennsylvania: Miners Rally for Union Rights By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS April 1, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/us/02brfs-MINERSRALLYF_BRF.html?ref=us Nearly 3,000 union mine workers rallied Friday in Waynesburg, the first major gathering of union members outside states where lawmakers are battling over collective bargaining rights. “What people don’t realize is when we’re gone, the good wages are gone,” said Regis Bozek, 57, a coal miner from Masontown. “My kids will never live as good as our generation did.” About 3,000 members of the United Mine Workers of America, their families and other supporters from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia attended the march. *-*-*-*-*-*-* *-*-*-*-*-*-* Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] NATO Warns Rebels Against Attacking Libyan Civilians
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == NATO Warns Rebels Against Attacking Libyan Civilians By THOM SHANKER and CHARLIE SAVAGE March 31, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/world/africa/01civilians.html?hp WASHINGTON — Members of the NATO alliance have sternly warned the rebels in Libya not to attack civilians as they push against the regime of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, according to senior military and government officials. As NATO takes over control of airstrikes in Libya and the Obama administration considers new steps to tip the balance of power there, the coalition has told the rebels that the fog of war will not shield them from possible bombardment by NATO planes and missiles, just as the regime’s forces have been punished. “We’ve been conveying a message to the rebels that we will be compelled to defend civilians, whether pro-Qaddafi or pro- opposition,” said a senior Obama administration official. “We are working very hard behind the scenes with the rebels so we don’t confront a situation where we face a decision to strike the rebels to defend civilians.” The warnings, and intense consultations within the NATO-led coalition over its rules for attacking anyone who endangers innocent civilians, come at a time when the civil war in Libya is becoming ever more chaotic, and the battle lines ever less distinct. They raise a fundamental question that the military is now grappling with: Who in Libya is a civilian? In the early days of the campaign, the civilian population needing protection was hunkered down in cities like Benghazi, behind a thin line of rebel defenders who were easily distinguishable from the attacking government forces. That is no longer always the case. Armed rebels — some in organized militias, as are other young men who have picked up rifles to fight them — have moved out of Benghazi in an effort to take control of other population centers along the way, they hope, to seizing Tripoli. Meanwhile, fresh intelligence this week showed that Libyan government forces were supplying assault rifles to civilians in the town of Surt, which is populated largely by Qaddafi loyalists. These civilian Qaddafi sympathizers were seenchasing rebel forces in nonmilitary vehicles like sedans and trucks, accompanied by Libyan troops, according to American military officers. The increasing murkiness of the battlefield, as the freewheeling rebels advance and retreat and as fighters from both sides mingle among civilians, has prompted NATO members to issue new “rules of engagement” spelling out when the coalition may attack units on the ground in the name of protecting civilians. It was unclear how the rules are changing — especially on the critical questions surrounding NATO’s mandate and whether it extends to protecting rebels who are no longer simply defending civilian populated areas like Benghazi, but are instead are themselves on the offensive. “This is a challenge,” said a senior alliance military officer. “The problem of discriminating between combatant and civilian is never easy, and it is compounded when you have Libyan regime forces fighting irregular forces, like the rebel militias, in urban areas populated by civilians.” Oana Lungescu, the senior NATO spokeswoman, emphasized that NATO was taking action because Qaddafi’s forces were attacking Libyan civilians, including shelling cities with artillery. She said that if the rebels do likewise, the organization will move to stop them, too, because the United Nations Security Council resolution “applies to both sides.” “Our goal, as mandated by the U.N., is to protect civilians against attacks or threats of attack, so those who target civilians will also be targets for our forces, because that resolution will be applied across the board,” she said. But it is no simple matter to follow that logic. “Qaddafi is trying to take advantage of this mixing of combatants and noncombatants to deter NATO from striking,” said one Obama administration official who was briefed on the intelligence reports. Even though rebel forces were in retreat on Wednesday, the civil war has seen repeated advances and retreats by both sides, and that is expected to continue. The highest concern is not how to deal with fighters who are loyal to the regime, but how NATO would respond to rebels firing on a town of Qaddafi sympathizers, like Surt. Calls by some NATO members to provide heavier weapons to the rebels suggest that these worries will only intensify. The deliberations about where to draw the line, going on at the highest levels of allied nations and among senior officials across the Obama administration, show how an intervention to stop a potential massa
[Marxism] NY Daily News Poll on Bradley Manning -- Vote Today
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Should Army pfc Bradley Manning face charges for allegedly stealing classified documents and providing them for WikiLeaks? New York Daily News Poll Results Thank you for voting: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ 2011/03/05/2011-03-05_wikileaks_private_loses_his_underwear.html?r=news Yes, he's a traitor for selling out his country! 28% No, he's a hero for standing up for what's right! 62% We need to see more evidence before passing judgement...10% Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Frozen Wages and the 'Curtailment' of Collective Bargaining
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Frozen Wages and the 'Curtailment' of Collective Bargaining My "two cents" by Bonnie Weinstein bauaw.org President Obama and the Democrats freeze the wages of public employees, in essence, freezing collective bargaining. Governor Walker and the Republicans "sharply curtail" bargaining rights for public workers. What the hell's the difference? The only rights we working people have are those that we fight for ourselves. With friends like the warmongering Democrats and Republicans and their "multi-class" parties pretending to represent "everyone" while representing only capitals' elite, who needs enemies? There can be no democracy when the wealthy minority rule by war, torture, police occupation and economic slavery of the masses of working people. Democracy is the expression of solidarity of the masses of working people in independent action and organization dedicated to the common interests and common good of working people; and opposed to the interests of the wealthy elite. We have no interests in common with them! Their sole interest is to rule over us and collect the profits we create with our labor for themselves. We have no democracy! Democracy is not the right to vote for one wealthy liar over another! Democracy is not voting for some person; it's the right to vote for the things we, the majority, want and need and what is our basic human right to have. True democracy will reign when working people turn the pyramid of capitals' wealth and despotic rule on its head, disarm them, and take control of the wealth we create with our labor and use it for the good of all of us and to preserve the planet we share. Democracy is majority rule and we working people ARE the majority across the globe! Our power is in our numbers. Our strength is rooted in our independent class interests and class solidarity! We have nothing to lose but our chains and a world to gain. We are only as strong as our weakest link. An injury to one, is an injury to all! WE HAVE THE POWER! SOLIDARITY FOREVER! DEMOCRACY IS WORKERS CONTROL! Dropkick Murphys - Worker's Song (with lyrics) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTafZRecy2k&feature=email&tracker=False Which Side Are You On - Dropkick Murphys http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKWfnO7fhQM&feature=email&tracker=False Lyrics : Our father was a union man some day i'll be one too. The bosses fired daddy what's our family gonna do? Come all you good workers, Good news to you I'll tell Of how the good old union Has come in here to dwell. CHORUS: Which side are you on? Which side are you on? (x2) My dady was a miner, And I'm a miner's son, And I'll stick with the union 'Til every battle's won. They say in Harlan County There are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man Or a thug for J. H. Blair. Oh workers can you stand it? Oh tell me how you can? Will you be a lousy scab Or will you be a man? Don't scab for the bosses, Don't listen to their lies. Us poor folks haven't got a chance Unless we organize ! Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Egyptian Workers: Complete the Revolution! By Chris Kinder
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Egyptian Workers: Complete the Revolution! By Chris Kinder Socialist Viewpoint March/April 2011 http://www.socialistviewpoint.org/marapr_11/marapr_11_02.html Spreading uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa look to Egypt as a great example for their own struggles. How the uprising in Egypt can inspire the world As uprisings against tyranny continue to consume the Middle East and North Africa, sparked partly by the Tunisian events, but mainly by the Egyptian Revolution's successful overthrow of the neo-monarchial Mubarak, working people and revolutionary youth in the Mid-East and around the world face a key question. Are these upsurges and revolutionary movements centrally about getting rid of dictators and establishing some form of democracy? Or are they really about the whole neo-colonial, socio-economic imperialist system that created and propped up most of the tyrants of the Middle East, and also grips the world in a punishing downward spiral of lowering living conditions and attacks on working people that grows directly out of its insatiable drive for profit? The financial crisis in the imperialist centers, the massive, international commodities speculation that followed, and the huge upward transfer of wealth throughout the world-masquerading as a "debt crisis"-has already created ripples of protest and rebellion worldwide. Working people in Greece, France, Britain, Ireland, and now even the state of Wisconsin and other states in the American Midwest are battling hard against foreclosures, privatizations, cutbacks, massive unemployment, tuition and price increases, attacks on unions, and the outright robbery of being forced to pay off huge loans to the very set of banks and finance capitalists who caused the crisis in the first place. And capitalist governments everywhere, whether autocratic or "democratic," are insisting that their people must pay the piper, and accept a brutal austerity so that the super rich finance capitalists can get richer. Libya in flames In the latest wave of protests and outright revolt, tyrannical rulers in the Middle East and North Africa, from Morocco to Iran and just about everywhere in between, are the chief targets of the mass uprisings. At this writing, Libya is the white-hot center of this broadening upsurge. Opposition to the 40-year rule of one man has led to what is now an outright civil war, in which perhaps as many as 600 to 1,000 have been killed in little more than a week, according to one close observer of the situation. Determined to remain in power, president-for-life Moammar Khadafy unleashed the dogs of war against his own people with unbridled brutality. Reports of dead bodies with their hands tied behind their backs, and helicopters flying low over houses and randomly firing at anyone who moves on the ground, are bubbling out through cell phones, as Khadafy tries to choke off all information. Khadafy made a rambling, semi-incoherent, and some would say insane televised diatribe in which he presented himself as a martyr (!) of Libyan independence from colonialism who is willing to be martyred again in this struggle against his own people. The irony of Khadafy's "anti-colonialist" rant is lost on no one, as his regime now enjoys being the third largest oil supplier to the European Union, and has especially close relationships with both Britain and Italy, the former colonial power. But a bullet in the head could be what he gets fairly soon, as entire police and military units, including air force pilots, have gone over to the opposition, and protesters are arming themselves. Khadafy is already looking like a Hitlerian madman, holed up in a bunker in Tripoli, as the opposition now controls practically the whole eastern half of Libya, including Benghazi, the second largest city in the country, and most recently controls some cities in western Libya as well. While the Khadafy regime was for years considered a rogue "terrorist" state, most of the other targeted autocracies are neo-colonial regimes that have been central to the U.S. imperialist network of client states for 30-40 years or more, with economies reeling under the grip of neo-liberal policies that allow easy exploitation by international speculators mostly based in imperialist centers. Unprecedented in modern times, these revolts are a strong harbinger of things to come, in an age in which the power of the imperialist center in the U.S. is beginning to weaken, and unravel. Central to the Middle East uprisings is the February 2011 Revolution in Egypt As Egypt is the largest of the Middle Eastern countries (82 million), and possessed of the most
[Marxism] Answer to Michael Moore: We ain't Gonna Play the Game No More!
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Answer to Michael Moore: We ain't Gonna Play the Game No More! By Bonnie Weinstein i...@socialistviewpoint.org socialistviewpoint.org The problem with Michael Moore's speech in Wisconsin March 5, 2011 is that the 14 Democratic emigres have already given away the economic security of the workers--their pay; their benefits; their vacations; their sick-days; their overtime. They have even convinced organized labor to accept the pay cuts, shorter hours--anything but unemployment, starvation and homelessness! What noble choices the good Democrats have given to the masses of struggling working people in Wisconsin and everywhere! In the prelude to his speech, Moore lauds those "heroic 14 Democratic" émigrés that have already given away the workers hard-won benefits and conditions for holding firm and staying away--"not one has come back!" he cheers. Where are the rest of the Democratic politicians around the country? Where's Obama when masses of workers are being sold down the river? What about all the Democratic governors and mayors who are doing the same thing in their respective states and cities across the country. There isn't one state or city that's lavishing more on social services; on schools; on community medical centers; on healthcare-- everyone everywhere EXCEPT THE TOP ONE PERCENT is being asked to give back and give up and surrender to the new middle ages--with the Democrats pretending and promising to steal a little less from workers than the Republicans! Workers can't depend upon any party that claims to represent both workers and the bosses. The jig is up! Working people need to make democratic decisions based upon our own needs and wants and what is good for us and our families; like whether to spend trillions of OUR dollars on wars based upon lies; or on massive bailouts to corporations who have stolen and hoarded the wealth for themselves; or whether to use the fruits of our labor to pay for healthcare; schools; housing; all the things people need to live healthy, free and happy lives. Working people produce the wealth; working people should have democratic control over that wealth and the means of production they operate to produce it. The game of voting for one capitalist liar over another is over. It's like plea-bargaining when you are innocent. It's a lose/lose situation and certainly, the workers of the world are losing the game! No, America is not broke. But telling workers to depend upon the capitalist electoral process, which only allows workers to vote for one capitalist representative over another, is preposterous and makes workers broke! We workers must take that wealth that we, and we alone create, into our own hands. We can. We are the majority. And it's the only hope for creating a happy and healthy future for all of us, our children and the world. As Rosa Luxemburg said, the only choice for workers is Socialism; or else, we will continue the plunge into Barbarism! *'America Is NOT Broke': Michael Moore Speaks in Madison, WI -- March 5, 2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgNuSEZ8CDw&feature=player_embedded America Is NOT Broke By Michael Moore, Open Mike Blog March 6, 2011 http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/274-41/5178-america-is-not-broke Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Protest in Egypt Takes a Turn as Workers Go on Strike
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == Protest in Egypt Takes a Turn as Workers Go on Strike By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK February 9, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/10/world/middleeast/10egypt.html?hp CAIRO — Protesters demanding the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak appeared on Wednesday to have recaptured the initiative in their battle with his government, demonstrating a new ability to mobilize thousands to take over Cairo’s streets beyond Tahrir Square and to spark labor unrest. As reports filtered in of strikes and unrest spreading to other parts of the city and the country, the government seemed to dig in deeper. Mr. Mubarak’s handpicked successor, Vice President Omar Suleiman, warned Tuesday that the only alternative to constitutional talks was a “coup” and added: “We don’t want to deal with Egyptian society with police tools.” But the pressure on Mr. Mubarak’s government was intensifying, a day after the largest crowd of protesters in two weeks flooded Cairo’s streets and the United States delivered its most specific demands yet, urging swift steps toward democracy. Some of the protesters drew new inspiration from the emotional interview on Egypt’s most popular talk show with Wael Ghonim, the online political organizer who was detained for two weeks. At dawn on Wednesday, the 16th day of the uprising, hundreds of pro- democracy demonstrators remained camped out at Parliament, where they had marched for the first time on Tuesday. There were reports of thousands demonstrating in several other cities around the country while protesters began to gather again in Tahrir Square, a few blocks from Parliament. By midday, hundreds of workers from the Health Ministry, adjacent to Parliament and a few hundred yards from Tahrir Square, also took to the streets in a protest whose exact focus was not immediately clear, Interior Ministry officials said. Violent clashes between opponents and supporters of Mr. Mubarak led to more than 70 injuries in recent days, according to a report by Al Ahram — the flagship government newspaper and a cornerstone of the Egyptian establishment — while government officials said the protests had spread to the previously quiet southern region of Upper Egypt. In Port Said, a city of 600,000 at the mouth of the Suez Canal, protesters set fire to a government building and occupied the city’s central square. There were unconfirmed reports that police fired live rounds on protesters on Tuesday in El Kharga, 375 miles south of Cairo, resulting in several deaths. Protesters responded by burning police stations and other government buildings on Wednesday, according to wire reports. On Tuesday, the officials said, thousands protested in the province of Wadi El Jedid. One person died and 61 were injured, including seven from gunfire by the authorities, the officials said. Television images also showed crowds gathering in Alexandria, Egypt’s second- largest city. Before the reports of those clashes, Human Rights Watch reported that more than 300 people have been killed since Jan. 25. Increasingly, the political clamor for Mr. Mubarak’s ouster seemed to be complemented by strikes in Cairo and elsewhere. In the most potentially significant action, about 6,000 workers at five service companies owned by the Suez Canal Authority — a major component of the Egyptian economy — began a sit-in on Tuesday night. There was no immediate suggestion of disruptions to shipping in the canal, a vital international waterway leading from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. But Egyptian officials said that total traffic declined by 1.6 percent in January, though it was up significantly from last year. More than 2,000 textile workers and others in Suez demonstrated as well, Al Ahram reported, while in Luxor thousands hurt by the collapse of the tourist industry marched to demand government benefits. There was no immediate independent corroboration of the reports. At one factory in the textile town of Mahalla, more than striking 1,500 workers blocked roads, continuing a long-running dispute with the owner. And more than 2,000 workers from the Sigma pharmaceutical company in the city of Quesna went on strike while some 5,000 unemployed youth stormed a government building in Aswan, demanding the dismissal of the governor. For many foreign visitors to Egypt, Aswan is known as a starting point or destination for luxury cruises to and from Luxor on the Nile River. The government’s Ministry of Civil Aviation reported on Wednesday that flights to Egypt had dropped by 70 percent since the protests began. In Cairo, sanitation workers demonstrated around their headquarters in Dokki. While state television h
[Marxism] EGYPTIAN NATIONALIST INTELLECTUALS UNITE WITH EGYPTIAN NATIONALIST YOUTH
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == (English Follows Arabic) EGYPTIAN NATIONALIST INTELLECTUALS UNITE WITH EGYPTIAN NATIONALIST YOUTH (Cairo, February 5, 2011) VIA Email مفكرون وطنيون يلتحمون مع الشباب الوطني القاهرة 3 فبراير 2011 لا شك أن الثورة المصرية انفجرت بشكل تلقائي ولا شك أيضا أن الشباب هم عمودها الفقري كما أن التظاهر السلمي المستمر هو الضامن والسند القوي لها. إننا نؤيد كافة مطالب الثورة الشعبية من أجل إزالة النظام والانتقال إلي نظام ديمقراطي حقيقي وعدالة إجتماعية وسيادة واستقلال وطني. كما نؤيد مطلب عدم التفاوض إلا بعد مغادرة الرئيس مبارك علما بأن الشباب أعلنوا بوضوح أنهم لم يفوضوا أحدا سواء فرد أو لجنة للحديث باسمهم. من الضروري أيضا وفي هذه الآونة بالذات ربط القضايا الوطنية بالنضال من اجل الحريات حتى يكون التغيير وطنيا وحتي لا يستغل أعداء الداخل والخارج الثورة لمصلحتهم فلا حرية لمواطن في وطن غير حر ولهذا نرفع شعار: حرية... عدالة اجتماعية ... سيادة وطنية ومن هذا المنطلق نؤمن بأن الحريات لابد بأن تسبق الانتخابات بفترة معقولة تطلق فيها حرية تكوين الأحزاب والنقابات المهنية والعمالية وحرية حركة طلابية بعيدا عن سيطرة وتلاعب الأمن وأعوانه ويتطلب ذلك أيضا تحرير أجهزة الإعلام بكافة أشكاله من قبضة السلطة، بعدها يمكن العمل على تعديل الدستور لمصلحة الشعب. والعدالة الإجتماعية ترتبط بمسار اقتصادي وطني جديد وغير تابع للمؤسسات الغربية يعتمد علي الإنتاج الصناعي والزراعي والبحث العلمي، هكذا نحل مشاكل البطالة. العدالة والتنمية الوطنية تتطلب الرقابة الشعبية المستمرة التي تحمي المواطن من الفساد وكنز الأموال الطائلة. أما السيادة الوطنية والاستقلال الوطني فهي محورية حتي نخرج من التبعية البغيضة لإسرائيل وللسلطة الأمريكية وتعني وقف ما يسمي بالتطبيع بكافة أشكاله بما في ذلك وقف جريمة بيع الغاز الطبيعي وتدمير الجدار العازل مع غزة ورفع الحصار عنها واتباع سياسات مستقلة تحمي المصالح الوطنية. المفكرون يلتقون مع الشباب علي المطالب والمباديء الآتية : ·ضرورة تغيير النظام وسياساته وتنحية الرئيس مبارك عن السلطة وتشكيل حكومة وطنية لا يكون من بينها رموز ووزراء السلطة أو من يعمل لصالح الهيمنة الأجنبية. ·حل مجلسي الشعب والشورى فاقدي الشرعية. ·إطلاق الحريات وإلغاء قانون الطواريء وكافة القوانين المقيدة للحريات وإلغاء لجنة الأحزاب والمحاكم العسكرية للمدنيين. ·ضرورة التحقيق لتحديد مسئولية القمع الإجرامي للمتظاهرين من قبل وزارة الداخلية وقوات الأمن المركزي وعصابات الحزب الوطني والتحقيق في ملفات التعذيب والقتل وكافة الانتهاكات السابقة تمهيدا لمحاكمة المسئولين عنها وإعادة هيكلة أجهزة الأمن. ·الإفراج الفوري عن كافة المعتقلين من شباب مصر الثائر وكافة المعتقلين السياسيين. ·مطالبة المؤسسة العسكرية بالانحياز لمطالب الشعب ومنها الحكومة المدنية وأن تقوم بواجبها في حماية لشعب. ·خلق المناخ اللازم لدعم حق المواطنة والتخلص العملي من بذور التمييز الطائفي. ·كشف محاولات الالتفاف وإعادة بناء النظام بوجوه مختلفة والحذر الشديد من محاولات اختطاف الثورة الشعبية خصوصا من أصدقاء إسرائيل والسلطة الأمريكية ومن دعاة الاستقواء بجهات أجنبية. إن المناداة بوحدة الصف لا يصح أن تكون غطاء لمثل هذه العناصر، إننا نرفض بشدة تغيير نظام بآخر يخدم المصالح الصهيونية والاستعمارية ومشاريع الشرق أوسطية أو يخدم مصالح رجال الأعمال الذين ساهموا في حلف السلطة والثروة. الموقعون (بصفتهم الشخصية) (تمت بعض التعديلات بعد توقيع البعض) ( ستضاف أسماء أخري عندما تصلنا: · المستشار طارق البشري الإعلامي أ. حمدي قنديل عميد متقاعد صفوت الزيات أ.د. هدى عبد الناصر الكاتب الصحفي فهمي هويدي الكاتب علاء الأسواني أ.د. أشرف البيومي أ. د. رضوي عاشور (بواشنطن للعلاج) الصحفي ا. أحمد الجمال الفنانة محسنة توفيق أ. عبد الحكيم جمال عبد الناصر أ.د. حسام عيسى أ.د. صلاح صادق د. عبد المنعم أبو الفتوح أ.د. عمر السباخي أ.د. رشدي سعيد المخرج خالد يوسف أ.د. عبد المنعم عبيد الصحفي د. عزازي علي عزازي الصحفي عبد العال الباقوري أ.د. عبادة كحيلة أ. عايدة العزب موسي رئيس تحرير "العربي" عبد الله السناوي الشاعر سيد حجاب الكاتب محسن عوض النائب السابق عبد العظيم المغربي أ. عبد الغفار شكر أ. حلمي شعراوي النائب السابق سعد عبود الإقتصادي أ. أحمد النجار أ.د. هدى المسيري أ. د. وداد حبيب سعد أ.د. نيللي حنا أ.د. سعيد صلاح الدين النشائي أ.د. شادية الشيشيني أ. جمال فهمي بمجلس نقابة الصحفيين الإعلامي عمرو ناصف أ. سمير مرقص م. أبو العلاء ماضي م. وائل خليل المخرجة عرب لطفي الأديبة سلوي بكر أ. د. سهير مرسي أ.د. سعدية منتصر أ. هالة صقر صيدلي جمال عبد الفتاح الفنانة جيهان فاضل أ. محمد واكد المخرجة أمل رمسيس أ.د. كمال نجيب د. صفوت حاتم أ. محفوظ عزام م. عمر عزام الصحفي عبد العظيم مناف أ. نجلاء القليوبي أ. مجدي حسين أ.د. مجدي قرقر EGYPTIAN NATIONALIST INTELLECTUALS UNITE WITH EGYPTIAN NATIONALIST YOUTH (Cairo, February 5, 2011) There is no doubt that the Egyptian revolution at hand erupted spontaneously, and that the Youth is its primary foundation. Continuing peaceful demonstrations lend strong support and legitimacy to this popular
[Marxism] World Trade Unions Mobilising for Democracy in Egypt: 8 February Action Day
== Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. == World Trade Unions Mobilising for Democracy in Egypt: 8 February Action Day International Trade Union Confederation February 4, 2011 http://www.ituc-csi.org/world-trade-unions-mobilising-for.html?lang=en Trade unions around the world will join a Day of Action for Democracy in Egypt on 8 February, following a decision by the ITUC General Council meeting in Brussels today. Unions will organise demonstrations at Egyptian embassies, and continue to press their governments to demand democratic transition in Egypt and to ensure that those responsible for the violent repression of peaceful demonstrations are brought to justice. “We will continue to push the international community to put pressure on the regime of Hosni Mubarak to respect the wishes of the Egyptian people. Our support for Egypt’s independent trade unions and the other forces for democracy is unwavering, and we are determined that there shall be no impunity for the people responsible for the killings, assaults and intimidation of innocent people,” said ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow. INTERNATIONAL TRADE UNION CONFEDERATION GENERAL COUNCIL (ITUC) REVISED DRAFT RESOLUTION ON EGYPT Brussels, 2 – 4 February 201 http://www.ituc-csi.org/resolution-on-egypt.html People across Egypt have risen in massive numbers to demand change, for democracy, justice, and fundamental rights and to insist on the end of the discredited Mubarak regime. Decades of repression, poverty, imprisonment of political opponents and violation of human rights including, through the imposition of state controlled organisations, the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining have stifled social and economic progress, and denied social justice. The ITUC expresses its full support and solidarity to the Egyptian people in their quest for respect for fundamental freedoms and rights and its deepest condolences to the many victims of the Mubarak regime’s violent repression of the legitimate protest actions which have taken place throughout the country. It pays tribute to all those who have stood up for democracy, and insists that human values must prevail over geopolitical and economic interests. As in Tunisia and elsewhere, worsening unemployment, particularly amongst young people, has combined with resentment at the lack of political freedom to catalyse popular mobilisation against the regime. The ITUC salutes the independent trade union movement, which has stood at the forefront of the mobilisation, and recognises the critical role that the independent unions must play in putting Egypt on the path to genuine democracy and in ensuring social and economic justice for the Egyptian people. The General Council: INSTRUCTS the General Secretary to continue to closely monitor the situation in Egypt, and to assist the development of the independent trade union movement there; REQUESTS all affiliates to call upon their governments to exert maximum international pressure for democratic transition in Egypt including full respect for freedom of association, collective bargaining and the other core labour standards; and, FURTHER REQUESTS all affiliates and solidarity support organisations to assist in every possible way the development of genuine, independent trade unions in Egypt and their actions to promote democracy, social justice, equality and decent work. INSISTS that those responsible for ordering physical attacks, or who sought in any way to use force to prevent people from exercising their right to freedom of expression or to demonstrate must be brought to trial and cannot remain unpunished. Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
